


filter through

by orphan_account



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Angst, Asexual Character, Beta OT4, Drug Use, F/F, F/M, Gay Bar, Homophobic Language, M/M, Multi, OT4, Polyamory, Poverty, Reincarnation, Sex Work, Sexual Assault, Sexual Content, Slurs, Stripping
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-16
Updated: 2017-07-27
Packaged: 2018-02-04 20:48:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 48,800
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1792723
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When your insane clusterfuck of a polyamorous household starts to run low on sweet, sweet cash, you take it upon yourself to fix the problem.  It’s prom night, the stage is your seventeen-year-old mistress, and you're about to learn the ups and downs of life as an amateur male stripper; both on, and off, the pole.</p><p>Time to go dancing.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. one

_The past is not simply the past, but a prism through which the subject filters his own changing self-image.  
\--Doris Kearns Goodwin_

* * *

Prism is a looming, angry rejection letter and you haven’t even gone inside. Your palm is sweaty around the cheap CD jewel case in your pocket. Your brother was DJ Strider, so the clear plastic cover glints over a homemade print-out reading ‘ _DJ Clockwerk_.’ Comic sans and tildes add the finishing touch, along with some cute little cogs courtesy of Jade.

The vast windowless exterior of Houston's second most popular gay bar gives way to a gaudy, glittering staircase, each support strut capped with a large faux crystal. There's no bouncer, no one manning the register, and your footsteps echo ominously against the sparkling concrete as you breach the second floor. You have an appointment, gotten for you by a friend of your brother's who has no idea that Bro died in a cruel transuniversal game and asked you instead if it was AIDS or drugs. You'd be out of this piece of shit city in a second if your brother's contacts hadn't kept you and your three professional tumors in resources for the last two years, including hooking you up with a home cheap enough for the four of you to live in.

Turns out that having guardians with hella cheddar in their bank accounts doesn't do you any good when you're sharted down into an alternate version of your planet where they only exist in memory.

The game left you with nothing but a super attractive case of PTSD and a tic under your left eye that you never had before. You feel your lower lid throb, now, as you shuffle your way through the massive, empty club building in search of the man whose opinion of your music will determine whether or not John gets a twenty-first birthday present this year.

You and them have been dragged through hell and horror and homelessness, cramped one-room apartments and year-long job searches, but right now you think you've got it sort of down. You have a house that doesn't cost you much rent because of one Mitch Howell who owed Bro Strider a favor and ran into you in a bar three years ago. All you have to do is maintain his grow room in the basement and look inconspicuous, which with the innocently angelic Prospitian Harleyberts in your midst isn't actually that hard. Rose is too clean-cut to give off the stoner vibe, and you run under the radar because you like smoking in nothing but your underwear, anyway. Wearing clothes while high makes you feel trapped.

The job search is going miserably but John gives piano lessons on the side of his delivery gig and Jade has a paid internship at a lab and Rose does writing on contract so you're getting by, less hungry than you've been in years, and you actually bought a brand-name shirt just for these meetings, even if your shoes and pants are thrift store drab.

“Hey there,” says a voice off to your side. His eyes scan you up and down. “Dave Strider?” he guesses.

“DJ Clockwerk,” you correct, forcing the coolest smile your stunning mug can manage and nodding, blonde bangs bobbing in your peripheral.

“Gotcha,” he says. He's not decked out in a suit or dripping in barely legal bitches like you expected, just wearing a t-shirt and jeans, the faded colours of an old sleeve running down one bare arm. From the blurriness of the lines you guess the tat has to be at least ten years old, but you don't ask anything about parlors or meanings and force yourself to look into the dubious smirk and salt-and-pepper goatee.

Bitches or not, he still looks like a douche. You shake his hand politely when it's offered, but you don't miss the little slightly-too-lingering squeeze at the end. You're pretty used to it, though. Twenty-one and you still look like a seventeen-year-old twink—no massive guns for Dave Strider, nope. You're a solid six inches shorter than your brother was; Bro was six foot six and more cut than a wedge of aged swiss. You're a centimeter under six feet and the approximate width of a sheet of glass. Ectobiology definitely screwed you.

“I understand you have something to show me,” the douche says after you spend a couple seconds focusing on not looking like you care about him checking you out. It _is_ a gay bar and you're not underage anymore, even if you've been getting these looks since you were sixteen and have long since grown annoyed with them.

You nod, trying to play it off. “Yeah, definitely,” you say, shrugging your shoulders and pulling the five-track sample out of your pocket. Humiliation washes over you when he takes it and you notice too late the smears of your sweaty fingerprints on the case. Not professional, dude, but just stay cool. You can keep it cool. “I did all of the work on those tracks,” you tell him, “Vocals, mixing, melody, alluvit.” Should you have said that so soon? Maybe he won't like it as much as a mix tape.

“We aren't really looking for original work,” he says automatically, even as he gestures for you to follow him up to the DJ booth. He pops in your tape and hits play, and your left eye flutters rapidly and your vision wobbles and you hope it's not visible.

Thirty seconds into the first track, he skips to the next one. This one makes nearly a minute before he flicks to the next. The third, he fast forwards to the middle after only nine seconds of listening, bobs his head for twenty-four seconds, fast forwards again, doesn't hear anything he likes, apparently, and stops the track.

Your stomach has tied itself in knots and is climbing into your ribcage you're so nervous.

“Alright hun,” says the douche, that massive fucking douche better _not_ patronise you, if he's going to let you down he needs to just do it don't _make it hurt your pride, too_. “I'm not going to lie to you: your stuff needs serious polishing. I don't know what the other guys have been telling you—” Is it that obvious you've been looking for a while? Shit. “—but you come in here with an original track instead of a solid dance mix and your chances are already low.”

You open your mouth to offer to show him a remix—you can do that, you have a couple on your phone that you could play right now, but with a wave of his hand he cuts you off. “Your work just isn't there yet, sweetheart.” Fuckyoufuckyoufuck _you_ he has no right to fucking talk to you like a child. It sucks, you get it. You didn't have your Bro's castoffs or his money and everyone cobbled your rig together second (or third) hand and you haven't had as much time to fine-tune because you've been moving and saving and searching and scraping and there are some areas where the majestic power of love just doesn't come through, despite all Disney's promises that it would.

Twinky little queers don't get what they want. You should know that by now.

“Hey,” he says, even though you didn't _do_ anything—you definitely didn't tense up and your shades are a solid barrier between the world and disappointed tears. “Don't look so broken, shit. I've got an offer to help you out.”

 _What_. You look up at him, blinking behind your shades, and force your voice calm when you say, “Yeah?”

“Yeah,” he agrees, smiling at you and popping the CD back into its case, dry sweat streaks on the cover and all. “We're looking for some guys to fill a few positions—” ohshit oh _shit_ “—and you look like you'd be more than capable of handling it.” Yes, yes, okay, yes, it's not a DJ gig but you can do this, this isn't going to be a disaster after all, you don't have to compare rejections with Rose and see the genuine sympathy in Jade's eyes when you break the bad news.

“Tell me, gorgeous, do you know how to dance?”

Planets collide, the earth's magnetic field disappears, and the resulting carnage eradicates your miserable existence with all the mercy the universe can muster (which is not much). You don't even get the chance to feel pain as the flames consume your wretched flesh.

* * *

He's a bastard and you were so mad leaving that the moment you crossed the threshold you threw your CD at the wall and watched it snap open and collapse to the filthy alley street. “ _Fuck!_ ” you scream. If it hadn't been the CD it'd have been your already trashed cellphone but you don't have enough money to replace it so you fist your fingers around it in your hoodie pocket until they hurt, until you can _see_ the ice-white of your freckled knuckles.

You leave Prism in the dust with its perverted owner and unreasonably high standards and shitty, ugly fake crystal accents that would make Martha Stewart weep over a stack of classy decorating tips.

You must be a special kind of worthless to have the first job you've been offered in seven months be a stripping gig, fucking shaking your barely-clothed weiner at flamboyant homogays with greasy singles clutched in their manicured hands. You're not good at much but you're better than that, better than a talentless ride up and down a metal pole for the pleasure of so many faceless strangers who unlike you actually _have_ cash to spare, cash enough to afford them a couple hours of objectifying people too desperate to say no. You have three lovers in your life already and you are no one's whore so you stomp away like you got slapped by the popular bitch at prom and now you're going to go get fucked up at an afterparty full of nerds that _she_ wasn't invited to.

That faggot's condescending offer stays trapped in the back of your head when you bang open the door to the house and fling your hoodie to the floor, not bothering to pick it up. Your phone thumps against one of John's sneakers and then Rose steps out of the kitchen, eyebrows raised.

“Don't ask,” you grumble, “ _Please_ don't ask.” Rose nods, and waggles the fingers of one hand toward you. Your body is tense and you're in pain but you allow her to draw you in, going stiffly into her arms and shoving yourself face-first into her hair.

Rose pets down your spine and rocks you back and forth, humming tunelessly. “It was an unsightly place, anyway,” she consoles you.

“That's for sure.”

“Don't worry,” Rose says, wiping her hands on the ruffled yellow apron she's wearing. Her hands smell like cut vegetables and flour and you remember a few years ago when she was in school and didn't have time to do any cooking or cleaning. Now your house is filled with choppy piano renditions of 'Row, Row, Row Your Boat' and Rose pretends to be a homemaker because it's been two months since she got money for her writing and a Master's in Psychology is way more useless in this economy than any of you anticipated. “John and Jade make enough between them to handle the rent. We'll be fine. We'll keep looking.”

She's still paying off her tuition debt—all of you scraped and sacrificed to get Rose through school, hoping that when she got a job things would magically be easier. Three states and countless applications later and your brilliant, beautiful Rose has given up even making passive aggressive comments when you or John forget to put the toilet seat down. You know she's applied to every clinic within an hour's drive at least twice, one four times over the past two years and if effort meant success then Rose would be the Queen of England, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and President Barack Obama all tied into one person, but her endless agonizing over every adjective, every conjunction and the placement of her commas doesn't count for anything more than sand through your fingers.

Debating the pretentiousness of hyphens versus semicolons versus parentheses keeps her mind off the abandoned short stories and unfinished novels that Rose put aside for more lucrative options that have since failed her. Even with all of her free time she doesn't touch them anymore.

You nod, knowing full well that Rose doesn't have anything there to look for. You'll search twice as hard for both of you.

The steps creak and thud as Jade stomps down them, decked in slacks and a button-up and goggles forgotten up on her forehead. Her long hair bounces behind her a second after each booted foot hits the stair. “Hi,” she says, scampering over to greet you with a kiss. You detach from Rose and allow yourself to be transferred to Jade like a tick moving from one host to another. You don't suck Jade's blood but you do scoop her up in your arms and hug her like you could melt back into ectoplasmic slime and reform as one being. Rose has a small smile on her lips when you part, Jade's brown cheeks flushed and warm with a dark red blush. “How'd it go?” she asks.

Jade isn't nearly as optimistic as she used to be but she likes to pretend, her and John, because you and Rose have this bad habit of slumping into incoherent depression and shutting down. John is still amazingly forward thinking but Jade, well. Jade is trying to put herself back together just as hard as you and Rose.

You hate to see the light—even the false light—leave her eyes when you shrug and say, “Wasn't in the cards.”

“Oh,” she says, touching your face. “I'm—”

“Don't be sorry,” you tell her, crushing her in your arms and purposefully mashing her face into your chest so she can't speak. “Shit was trashy as fuck, anyway. Like I don't think the people who have a self-respect deficit massive enough to allow them to go there would even listen to anything that isn't Lady Gaga or Madonna anyway.”

“This coming from the boy who includes Kesha samples in most of his mixes,” smirks Rose.

You snicker, kissing the top of Jade's head and relaxing your arms so you aren't squishing her quite as much. She slips her hands into your back pockets as you say, “That's because Kesha is an artistic genius,” and that's when the front door blows in.

Jade screeches and you grope for a sword that isn't there and Rose reaches under her apron and pulls out the sharpened metal needles she's carried with her every day since she gave up eldritch magic.

There's nothing there but wind, cold and angry, but none of your minds go to ghosts or storms. Rose puts the needles away as you walk into the brunt of the gale, fighting the heavy gusts as you make your way to the beat-down blue car sitting in the front of the drive.

“John?”

His face is in his hands. He sits, unresponsive, in the driver’s seat. The doors are locked and the wind is making your eyes water even with the protective layer of your shades.

John does this thing. It's this stupid thing that all of you probably _try_ to do but John succeeds at the most: he maintains a strong exterior, doesn't talk about his problems, and doesn't show weakness. While you and Jade and Rose lose your cool on the regular, John keeps his smile, maintaining that freakouts are for kids and he's not a kid anymore. You don't see him cry ever, to the point where sometimes you go crazy wondering what he's really feeling.

Sometimes, though, you get a hint—a big one.

See, the game still exists. You didn't break it. You didn't get rid of it. You beat it so it let you go even though you cheated like a man desperate, and while it's leaving earth alone (for now) it's still left its mark. It created you, anyway. You’re pretty sure it can’t be gone if you still exist.

Some days, Rose knows what you did when you were halfway across town and not picking up your phone. Every once in a while Jade will appear somewhere she shouldn't be, and sometimes when all you're doing is listening to one of their heartbeats a clock will tick in your head and your perception will slow and you still remember every single second that passes no matter where in the country you are.

Sometimes when John smiles there's a pleasant breeze that runs through the house, and sometimes John clenches his fists and a tree collapses under a blast of wind that could take out a city block if he didn't just relax and let it go.

“John!” you call, banging on the window. It starts to rain, spitting on the windshield and sticking your hair to the surface of your shades. “Get out of the fucking car, shithurdle, you gay ass fuckface, what's wrong with you?” No response. “John, c'mon, don't make me—” You see yourself touching a finger to the lock, you see years fast forwarding and metal breaking into rust and a lock giving away, decrepit, and you curl your nails into your palm because John can't afford to fix anything you break. You're about to call for Rose and Jade when everything around you blacks out of existence and then your entire orientation _lurches_ ; spun off your axis you fall onto your knees next to John, landing on the living room rug.

Rose forces the door closed as the wind continues to howl outside. Jade's knees hit the floor next to yours. Her strong hand grabs your shoulder, the other reaching for John. “I'm sorry,” she says, “I didn't mean to hurt you, I didn't know what else to do!”

“No,” mumbles John. “No, I'm sorry. I'm so sorry,” he moans into his hands. You cross from merely upset to Deeply Fucking Concerned, gravitating toward your best friend across the stained carpet. This isn't John. John doesn't _do_ this. That's you, that's Jade, that's Rose, but not _John_.

“John.” Rose's voice is sharp, precise.

He breathes heavily, borderlining on hyperventilation. The whole house creaks under the force of the storm, support beams wailing. “John,” she repeats, “look at me.” No one can refuse Rose—it's impossible, so John lifts his chin and looks at her with watery eyes. You and Jade flank his sides and Rose places herself directly in his lap, curving her palm over his cheek and guiding his face until his damp temple rests against her cheek. “What happened?” she asks after a respectable amount of time, hand gently stroking his hair.

“I didn't mean to,” he spits out. “I fucked everything up, Rose, I'm so sorry.”

“No,” she says, shaking her head. You put your hand on John's knee, not sure what to do—John isn't supposed to be like this, damn it—but Jade circles her arms around the both of them and rocks them gently, a silent but strong presence. “I won’t let you apologize for something you haven't even told us about yet,” she says pragmatically. “Tell me why you're upset.”

John's chest expands from the force of one shuddery breath, then he sighs into her cheek. “I got fired.”

Your chest goes icy.

Jade stops rocking them. “What?”

“I got fired,” John repeats. “I'm _so sorry_ ,” and the house screams as rain torrents from the sky and something cracks outside and he buries his face in Rose's neck and lets out the most broken sound you've ever heard him make.

Your heart twists in real, physical pain. John can't be broken because he's not allowed to be broken John isn't broken he's strong he's always strong John doesn't cry because you all shouldered the burden of being fucked up and John got out easy, you want him to not hurt as much as you do and he can't be fired he fucking can't be the rent's coming up, Jade needs new boots, the fridge is almost empty and this

cannot

be happening.

But John is explaining, and even though you only hear snatches of it – _guy at work, asking questions, my dad, where i'm from, about my friends, wouldn't leave me alone_ – the dread of incoming reality pools in your stomach like LOHAC's lava, this is real and it actually happened and John is crying and he lost his job and the best you can do right now is get an offer to take off your clothes and nothing is okay. “We were in the loading dock,” John explains, no no no stop talking this can't be right— “And he reached for my shoulder, and—I'm sorry, Rose, I didn't want him to touch me. I didn't fucking want him to—”

“I know,” Rose says, her fingers trembling against his cheek. “Keep going.”

“I jumped out of the way and bumped into someone. We were moving— It was this antique furniture set, the clock was about two million dollars and Joey slipped and dropped it. It was my fault and everyone knew it and they fired me on the spot,” he finishes with a sob.

You're gonna be sick. Your hand slips off his knee.

That makes three. All three of you are unemployed and Jade is the only one who has any steady income and it's just a shitty internship...

This isn't the first time this has happened. John sacrificed school and his dream job to just... work. Whatever job he could get, he worked. He wanted you guys to be able to do what you wanted (though fat lot of good that's done for you) and so he was stuck working at fast food and chain restaurants, whatever would hire him. He was charismatic and smart so he got jobs, but life happened and not everything was sustainable. John's been fired a handful of times, for this and that, like the one time you broke your leg and John left work to come to the hospital (fucking idiot), or the time he stayed up all night coaxing Jade through nightmares and was so tired in the morning he slept through his alarm. It's never his fault but it always happens and you're so overwhelmed that you have to stand up, stumbling out of the living room, you turn to go up the stairs to your bedroom and—

You freeze.

You don't know how you didn't hear it, but you feel wind coming through an open door from the piano room. The Piano Room is where John does his lessons, and it's home to a Steinway Grand. It's the most expensive thing any of you own and it's John's prized possession and at first you think the window was just _open_ but then you see the glass shards and you don't know whose name you shout but you shout because rain and wind are streaming in _all over the fucking piano_. There are footsteps and noises and then space warps and Jade displaces the piano into the living room where it's safe but you fear the damage has already been done.

* * *

You find an old smuppet in your closet.

The last four hours have been spent with your family tearing through all of your belongings. You have a small (emphasis on _small_ ) pile in the middle of the den consisting of anything of value, anything that could be sold for quick money. Rose and you put up flyers and John's been spending every waking minute filling out applications and Jade tore apart some of her tech so she could hock the parts.

Sunday night most businesses are closed so John is home and the atmosphere is tense. Between all of you there's about four hundred dollars worth of stuff, which is fucking worthless when the repairs for John's piano are looking to be somewhere between five and ten thousand dollars.

The lid is warped and needs to be completely replaced. There's broken strings and the whole rig fell out of tune. There's a couple more piano-y details that you only got mumbles about from John—you wouldn't know, you do keyboard in your jams because John taught you how to play, but you have exactly jack shit in the way of knowledge on actual balls-to-the-wall pianos.

The repairs are honestly so expensive that you'd just sell the wreckage for someone to restore on their own if losing this piano didn't mean abandoning John's only source of income. Without giving piano lessons the three of you will be left to survive on nothing but Jade's internship and she isn't even sure how reliable that's going to be in the long-term. Without the next two weeks of lessons you are all literally, metaphorically, spiritually and unbelievably _fucked_.

And now all that your diligent search has provided you with is an old smuppet that could probably run you forty bucks if you marketed it as vintage, maybe forty-five if it vibra—yep, it's a vibrating one with the little fuckhole in the back. You're sure some pervert will love it.

It gets thrown into the middle of the room where there is a collection of stuff that is so sparse that to call it a pile would be actively insulting to actual piles of things. You slump against the wall heavily, sliding down until you're crumbled on the floor in a useless lump. “Fucking shit,” you say to no one in particular. The smuppet smiles back at you innocently, dull, dead eyes silent and unjudging. Welcoming, even.

You hated these things growing up and you still hate them now, even though it's been a while since you've seen one. Distance did _not_ make your heart grow fonder, but thanks to everyone for asking. Not.

You sigh, your hands raking through your hair. You want to apologize to the air for your existence but you feel like the smuppet will somehow hear you if you talk so you bite the inside of your cheek and chew it as you attempt to stare down the hideous abomination of a sex toy just all sitting and stuff, right there in the middle of your room. Pointedly not judging you but you see it and remember feeling inadequate and unsure your whole life, consumed by Bro's shadow and Bro's expectations and Bro's standards and Bro's irony and Bro, Bro, Bro, everything was Bro and if you could tell him one more thing it'd be “fuck you” because he tried to make you a clone of himself, tried to make you _strong,_ but in the end you're only you and that is infinitely less impressive.

When Bro was dirt poor and raising an infant he didn't cry alone in his bedroom over his mostly-worthless belongings, he created a fucking _empire_ and became a goddamn millionaire. Who cares that he didn't actually change his lifestyle or use his money for anything other than video game consoles and really good weed? Bro was a winner, and despite his efforts you're just... not.

Bro needed money so he fucked puppets on a webcam because he did what he had to do and you're not sure you can live up to that legacy.

You know you can dance. You know you have rhythm and flow and you can be an amazing DJ if someone would just give you a chance, but you have a skinny model bod and terrified or not there's a voice in the back of your head that says “you could do this if you weren't such a fucking pussy.”

It's hard not to believe it. What else would be holding you back? If you weren't scared of ripping apart what's left of your dignity, if you didn't get fucked up and _shut down_ instead of getting to business, you'd be jumping on this opportunity like a cat on a delicious, fat sewer rat. Strippers make good money. You already have guys hitting on you for free so you can't really see any _logical_ reason why you wouldn't just go somewhere where they have to pay you for your time.

Running on logic doesn't do shit when you can't bear to sink that low, when you told yourself there was a difference between you and Bro and Dirk and Davesprite and Alpha Dave and any other fucking clone abominations that might be better than you are. You could produce something quality and you could have integrity and you could support your family but hey, look at you now, a handful of years later and you haven't been able to accomplish even half of what they did. Everyone in your ectobiological family has had more success than you at general usefulness when it comes to being a functional family member.

The loves of your life are going down and you're doing nothing to help the rapid sinking other than bogging the rest of them down and only the knowledge that it'd make you even more of a shitbaby keeps you from breaking into tears right at this moment.

There's a knock at your door. You scrub at your face, squeak out, “Come in.”

You can tell it's John before the door even opens, just from the way the floor creaks when he shifts his weight. His broad shoulders are slumped in such a not-John way that it freaks you out, makes you want him to go away, which in turn freaks you out even more. You never want John to go away. He's your lover, your best bro, your stronger-than-you’ll-ever-be other half, not even your shounen riva. You can’t rival him because John just stumbles through life being completely unbeatable.

He looks pretty beat now, though, and you aren’t sure what to do with it.

John stands in the middle of your room looking tired. You stare up at him, wide-eyed behind your shades but keeping the rest of your face perfectly blank. After a few moments of silence, he rakes his hand through his hair and says, “You ever get that feeling of life kicking you when you’re down?”  
  
You snort. “Yeah, bro.” You don’t tell him anything about it because you can’t.

John’s shoulders slump even further, if possible. “It sucks,” he says, stating the obvious but that’s just something John does so you don’t bother teasing him for it. You just nod, look off to the side, then throw him a weary glance from the corner of your eyes.

Sometimes you wish the trolls and their quadrants were still around—okay, no, you _always_ wish the trolls were still around. You do not usually wish quadrants were still a thing, but there are times while aging where you’ve managed to get an idea of what Karkat was getting at all those years, even if it’s way too late to take back all the insults, way too late to not have broken up with Terezi, way too late to do anything different (not that there’s a guarantee that you would have, but). You’ll still fuck John ten ways from Sunday and then some, but you feel something that is suspiciously well described by the phrase ‘romantic pity’ and you reach a hand toward him.

“C’mere,” you say. The words are barely out of your mouth before John’s hand is firm around yours, warm and scratchy and a little shaky. You tug him toward the ground, indicating for him to sit next to you.

He comes to rest beside you, your shoulders almost touching but not quite. Casual intimacy can be hard between you and John, not because of his ‘not gay’ phase, but mostly because he spent a while at the beginning of your relationship terrified that he’d fuck up your friendship. The two of you are best bros first and lovers second and it took a while to settle into a rhythm that didn’t seem to compromise that. You want to comfort him but you don’t know how, aren’t sure how to offer solidarity on an issue this life-fuckingly horrible.

Frankly, you have no idea why he came to _you_. Rose is everyone’s personal therapist and Jade gives better hugs and you’re just kind of stuck being sad alone in your room wondering how you’re going to support your fucking family.

Hesitant, ready to pull away at a second, you reach over and run your fingers through the short hairs at the back of John’s head, scritching at his neck. He leans into you, a wheezy groan thrumming in the back of his throat. He still doesn’t touch you anywhere else, but you feel you made the right call.

“Dave,” says John, still tilting his head into your hand.

“Yeah?”

You feel him swallow. You ruffle up his hair and then smooth it back down, waiting. “Are you mad at me?”

It interrupts your flow, John’s question. Your fingers stutter in his hair, jerking a centimetre away like he’s a piece of wet food you just found in the dishwater.

Are you mad at him?  
  
You know you’re mad at yourself for a number of reasons, ones that don’t need to be hashed out right now. Are you mad at John for making it that much harder to survive, though? Are you mad at him for fucking up? You don’t think so, but you take a second to wonder, sitting quiet with your wrist supported on his shoulder, fingers hovering in the air awaiting your decision.

After a moment your hand presses back into his hair, firmly massaging his scalp. John seems to melt before the words, “Nah, man,” even leave your mouth.

“We both fucked up,” you say, not elaborating on how you fucked up, and hoping he won’t ask. “You’re trying to fix it and that’s all I can ask. If you waste time beating yourself up about it instead of just fixing it, though, I’ll have you know I’m gonna hafta strife that shit out of you. No-go, brother. No-go.”

He smiles—a little weak, but it’s there—and then dips in, slow and languid and holding back just enough, giving you time to react. You tilt your head a bit and let him come to you, licking your lips in anticipation. John’s mouth is softer than yours, gentle against your lips, all split and chapped and scabby. His kisses are chaste even after all these years. John is so much more than a sexual person—he’s down for making out but is also more than happy to just hold one of you in his arms. Sometimes he opts out of sex and just lounges, watching, not even touching himself or anything, just drinking you all in.

You’ve come to enjoy John’s — not innocence, but his regularity. It’s stable and solid, John’s presence in your life. Opaque like oil over water but also fluid, bending to fit against you without ever bending too much, or in such a way that you’d stop being supported.

He kisses you in that firm, fond way and you owe it to him to be strong for him now. John can’t hold it all, he’s got three people to support and that has to be hard, even if his chest is broad enough for all of you to lay across it when he’s on his back and you’re piled in the giant futon you share. Your hand forms to fit the curve of his skull and you kiss him until he pulls away, mouth quirked up into an uneven grin.

You grin back and then push yourself up. You feel better offering your hand to him again, better when he takes it and lets you haul him to his feet. “Yo, not that I don’t want to ravish that fine ass,” you say, giving him a second to laugh and elbow you, “but we have got some freaknasty spring cleaning to get back to.”  
  
“Jade would kick our butts,” says John.  
  
“And Rose would let her. Glad we’re in agreement.”

The job offer is a phantom at the back of your mind when John props your door open and starts helping you go through your stuff. It stays in the back of your mind when Rose makes the decision to give up the game consoles that you guys bought second-hand with months of saved dollars and spare change.

You try to ignore it, even as you make a craigslist post for your entire collection of darkroom and photo equipment, including all of your cameras and lenses.

You almost succeed, except a week later you’ve only raised about a thousand dollars in junk (the bareness of your house gets to you, all the things you tried to make a home with pared down until you start feeling the ache of poverty all over again) and then Jade comes home crying and everything goes to shit again.

Jade’s internship will be over in a month. She thought she had half a year to go but it turns out she’s too brilliant for their timeline and got the work done in double the time. Your heart aches while she cries at the dinner table, John’s arm around her shoulders and Rose’s eyes on her, heavily lined and tired. Rose looks composed but her makeup is smudged and you wonder how long you’re going to be able to keep going with this.

Mitch will give you an extension on the rent but he’s been edgy with you lately; you think he wants to raise the rent but doesn’t want to spring that shit on Bro’s kid (espesh since the fucker’d probably come back to haunt him if he did). He’s been less interested in weed lately, which might mean he’s moved on to harder shit and might mean he’s cleaning himself up, neither of which bodes favourably for your family.

Whether or not Mitch is getting into meth or just the coffee pot at his steady 9-to-5, you have more pressing matters, like how your family is going to eat in a month when your only source of income is reduced to zero and John’s piano still needs to be fixed.

Rose sips her tea and takes a breath. “This is quite unfortunate, but all is not lost.” Your eyes all settle on her, awaiting her dispensary of wisdom. “As you’re all aware, supporting four people on limited income has been difficult, and supporting four people on nothing at all may very well run us out of our home—something I’m not willing to see happen. Thus, I propose a solution; perhaps an unfavourable one, but one I believe is necessary considering the circumstances.” Pause, breath, sip of tea. “As you know I have quite a bit of money saved up…”  
  
Your chest seizes.

“Rose.”  
  
“Rose, _no_.”

You aren’t sure who said what but that’s the last thing on your mind right now. Rose’s money is the only thing in the house everyone deemed untouchable. Her high interest bank account is a one-way street, some kind of no-way-out suicide mission where money goes to die. No emergency is big enough to merit dipping into this account. She’s been saving for _years_.

There’s a little outlet for lease about three miles away from your house—only a couple minutes away by bus. It’s been empty since before you even moved to Houston, but it’s not a bad place, just small.

It’s been Rose’s dream to open her own clinic. You don’t know how close she is to the goal, but you know she at least has almost enough to afford the place’s lease. After that, she could take out a loan, start fixing it up and hiring people and she could go back to school to get her doctorate and she’d be Dr. Lalonde in her quiet little practice, everything she’d ever dreamed of.

Ten thousand dollars is no small sacrifice from this dream.

“You can’t,” you say, and “Rose, I couldn’t ask you to!” John says, and “Don’t you dare!” spits Jade, but Rose remains insouciant.

“It may or may not surprise you to hear that I’ve already made my decision.” She reaches into her apron pocket and pulls out an envelope, which she primly sets on the table and pushes over to John. “You’ve already missed a week of lessons. We can’t allow that to continue.” At first it seems that John is going to refuse to even look at it, but he pulls the unglued flap open and tugs out a blank check, signed and everything. “Call the repairman for as soon as they can arrive. I’ll cover the entirety of the cost.”

The ensuing argument is brutal and messy and more than one of you cries. You manage to hold off until you can excuse yourself to the bathroom but John gross sobs in front of God and everyone and this time it’s Jade’s turn to hold him. Your heart aches but you and Rose stay back, letting the Wondertwins suss it out.

Eventually John gives in, which surprises you, but maybe not as much as it would have if he hadn’t seemed so bone-deep exhausted, so ready to give up. You forgive him for letting Rose win, even if you don’t want to, but that night you sleep in the den and leave the three of them alone on the futon. Rose gives you reproachful looks in the morning but you shrug them off, pouring chocolate milk on your rice chex and shoveling spoonfuls into your mouth and pointedly not ruminating on how none of them know how badly you’re letting them down.

It nearly takes another week, which makes you hate yourself all the more when you hop off the bus and look up at the massive, foreboding walls that enclose Prism’s unique, gaudy hell.

* * *

“So, uh,” you say over the dinner table, staring at your food. “I got a job.”  
  
Rose’s eyebrows rocket sky-high. “I didn’t know you’d applied anywhere else.”

“I didn’t,” you bullshit. You’d prepared a whole speech but it all goes out of your head the minute Rose starts to question you. Swallowing, you choke out, “I went back to Prism, there was some other guy there. I’d listened to the other douchefuck’s advice and showed him a couple remixes and he liked my work, said he’d pull a few strings. Et voila.”

The Harleyberts’ faces are alive with elation, more bright than you’ve seen them in days, but Rose’s eyes are narrowed with suspicion. “You didn’t tell us?”  
  
Chewing, chewing, swallowing wrong, coughing. “Didn’t want you to get—” cough, cough “—disappointed.” You think it’s a fair enough excuse. Rose doesn’t look convinced, but her dubious interrogation is interrupted by Jade springing out of her chair and tackling you, a vice grip around your neck.

“That is _so great!_ ” she emotes, grinning from one ear to another. The smile makes you warm; eases some of the ache. “What are you going to be doing?”  
  
Your throat is dry and tight. “Just some display work—video, graphic design, audio, you know. General promotional stuff and shit to put on the screen to amuse people who aren’t quite drunk enough yet. Working my way up for now, but if I impress the big guy I might get a shot at DJing.” You don’t know if John and Jade buy it or are just too tired to question it, but Jade kisses you and sits in your lap for the rest of dinner and John holds your hand under the table. Your family is starving for good news so you let them believe the lie even while a timer is counting down in your head until Rose pries the truth out of you.

As soon as Rose lifts the plates off the table, stacked neatly in a pile, Jade jumps up and drags you out of your chair, pulling John along like a baby elephant. The dishes click in the sink and then Rose is following the line to the bedroom, accepting when John snickers and reaches out to take her hand.

Jade pushes you down to the bed and pounces, wild and full of giggles while tugging at your shirt. Rose, apparently giving up on skepticism (for now), gives John a shove and spills down after him, both of them joining Jade in divesting you of your clothing. They peel you apart until you’re naked and vulnerable before them, until you’re hard and gasping under Rose’s mouth and John’s hand and Jade’s teeth at your throat.

It’s been weeks since all four members of your family got the energy for sex, but now you’re drowning on the taste of Rose’s tongue as Jade throws a brown thigh across your hips and sinks down on you. John presses himself against Rose’s back, flaccid and still in shorts but smiling brilliantly as he slides a large hand down Rose’s meticulously shaved skin and begins to move with you, all four as one writhing multi-limbed beast. Shit, you could take a picture and throw it into the sky with the rest of the horrorterrors, no one’ll be able to tell the difference.

You arch your back and come to the tune of Jade squealing, Rose gasping in your ear and John laughing, full of relief and amusement. You make a witty comment as you edge Jade off you and reposition everyone, Jade’s legs trembling over Rose’s face, John between her knees, and you watch them fall down the rabbit hole one-by-one. With Jade flopped on her side, curled around Rose’s head, you offer John a blowjob but all he does is elbow you in the thigh and manhandle you into position so he can give you one instead. He gets you off a second time, squirming and red faced as the girls pat your skin in soothing circles, and you lay in an exhausted heap and are almost happy, cramming as many people into your skinny arms as possible, until you think of a few nights from now and anxiety seizes in your chest.

Most of the time you don’t sleep until twelve or later but you roll over and hit the bedside light so they won’t see anything wrong in your face and navigate Jade into your arms with the excuse that they’ve worn you out and you need a nap. You bury yourself in a tangle of Jade’s massive expanse of hair and try to get rest.

* * *

Your face burns with humiliation.

It’s your first night on the floor, a tray of shots perched in your hand, and you aren’t wearing the underwear you showed up in. How that happened is a hot mess of a memory that you can’t seem to escape, especially not when you see raised eyebrows and trailing eyes slanting in the direction of your crotch. Half of your asscheeks are on display in this thing and the rest are lovingly highlighted by the blacklight over fresh-out-of-the-pack white.

You’d brought your own underwear, along with a pair of skinny jeans with huge chunks of material cut out of the backs of the thighs, deeming it slutty enough to justify your work. You won’t be stripping at first, probably not at all tonight. The douchefuck wasn’t joking about you working up--you’ll likely be on shots for a couple weeks before you get to hit the dance floor, kind of like a seniority system. You don’t know. The implication you got was that if you don’t blow some important people you’ll be on shot duty forever before you actually get a chance to make some serious tippage.

You were breathing heavy into the dressing room mirror, staring at the glass of your shades when a shape appeared behind you, a heavy wrinkle between two impossibly dark eyes. You forget his name—Moon, Star, Sunspot, some space shit—but you recognize him as The Indian Kid Who Represents The Club’s Top Stripping Talent. He was introduced to you as the King of Ass or something equally inane, basically identifying him as the most popular dancer in the joint or something.

Dude actually looks kind of like a huge prick.

“Do _not_ fucking tell me you’re going out like that.”

“Um,” you say. “Yes?” You entone it like it’s a guess but it isn’t really, mostly you’re confused about why he won’t mind his fucking business like everyone else in the hellhole you’ve come to be employed by.

“Ha. Hahaha.” It’s not a laugh, he just _says_ ‘ha,’ and you kind of hate him for it. “So I’m guessin’ you don’t want to make any money tonight.” You really hate how he talks.

You shrug, rolling your shoulder and turning to the side so you can’t see him in the mirror. “I don’t think I asked you, actually,” you snip, ripping open your bag and pretending to look through it.

He scoffs. “If you go out there looking like that not only are you going to not make it through even one tray, but you’re going to make about negative tips.”  
  
“Bullshit,” you say, figuring he’s just trying to psych you out.  
  
“I’ve seen it happen before, fuckface. I’ve been working here for three years; you think I ain’t seen someone have to pay out the rest of the liquor that gets wasted because they didn’t sell it?”

You falter. “No fuckin’ way.”  
  
“Yeah,” he says, then nods at your jeans. “Those are okay for the first hour, if you want to tease, but I wouldn’t suggest it on your first day, and definitely not for more than two hours if you can help it. Now take ‘em off, let me see what you’re packin’ under it.”  
  
Fuck no. “Fuck no.”

He raises his eyebrows, thick and bushy and barely tamed at all. “Why the fuck not?”  
  
“Because you’re just some random stranger who came bursting into my business like the goddamn Kool-Aid man of unwanted advice?” You give up on your bag, throwing your phone down into it and beginning to affix a little lock to the zipper to keep it away from any prying fingers. You’d keep it in your car, but hahahaha.

Black Hole gives you a snooty look, then says, “Look, honey bunches, you’re about to walk out onto that floor and have your ass groped more times than you can count hairs on your fuckin’ head. If you want to be modest and prissy, this ain’t the place to do it. So you got a choice, sister: you can either show me, right here, without much of an audience, or you can wait to test your miserable failure out on the floor. Your choice.”

It takes you a few more seconds to reluctantly lower your jeans down your hips, but Meteor Shower is already sniggering before you’re even halfway done. Offended, you drag your pants back up, bunching your fists in front of your junk. “What the fuck.”  
  
“Is that _Spongebob?_ ”

...well. Uh. “Yeah. Yeah it is.”

“You’re fucking with me,” he says. “You honestly expect to get tips wearing baggy boxers with a kid’s cartoon character on them?” To be honest, you were halfway between thinking that it’d be ironically funny and that they were one of the newer pairs of underwear that you owned so they’d be less offensive than the maroon ones with the hole in the flap.

“Didn’t really think about it,” you lie.

“You can’t go out there looking like that,” he says, shaking his head. “You’ll be eaten alive.” You look at his skinny brown frame, his tousled shoulder length hair, neon pink jock strap and the white see-through wifebeater he’s wearing slung around the ensemble, sides slit down to the waist. You specifically examine the galaxy-toned glitter fanning around the corners of his eyes, over his cheeks, and wonder in what world _you’ll_ be eaten alive, while this mouthy twink will fit right in.

Shrugging uncomfortably, you look at yourself in the mirror and then mutter, “Don’t have anything else, bro.”

Galaxy Eyes stares at you for a second, then huffs a breath. “One minute,” he says, turning away from the door. “Don’t move. Don’t you dare fucking even approach the door out before I get back.”

You turn to him, bewildered, but he’s already gone, leaving you standing alone in an empty, glittery dressing room. Not two minutes later he’s back with a shiny plastic bag in his hand. You don’t get a good look at it before he throws it at you with a curt, “here.”

The plastic is thick and durable, clear but obscured by a half ripped off sticker, with something concealed inside it. You flip it over, inspecting the package before it dawns on you that you’re holding a pair of underwear in your hand—another dude’s underwear, not yours or John’s, and he just gave it to you just like—what the _fuck_. “What the fuck, dude,” you say, trying to shove it back at him.

Constellation jerks his hands up, refusing to take it. “Ain’t worn ‘em,” he says, huffing. “They’re new, still in the bag, in case you couldn’t tell. Just—no, fucker, just keep them. I was gonna wear them later tonight but I already got something to change into, don’t even. Put them on and don’t whine about it. You can thank me later.”  
  
You aren’t done protesting but you take the underwear out of the bag to examine anyway, squinting. They’re white with a blue band and a brand name in yellow. They don’t look special other than how fucking small they are—you can’t guess how much of your ass they’re going to cover but your guess is somewhere under 75%, if that. You stare at them until Asteroid sighs, shifts, and looks out the door. “The club opens in negative thirty seconds,” he informs you.

“Yeah, okay,” you say, crushing the garment in your hand. “Thanks, uh…”  
  
“Nova,” he says, staring at glossy painted blue-and-pink nails.

You consider this for a moment. “That’s faggy as hell,” you say.

Nova snorts. “Yeah. Welcome to Prism, sweetheart,” and then he turns and sashays out of the doorway.

You don’t feel very welcome.

The lighting is so low you can barely see in some areas through your shades, but you're too self conscious to take them off. You made it through the whole game without removing them and you don't need to start now—this is just another battle you need to learn how to navigate, except this time you don't have any overbearing older brother to beat you into competence. Sex work might run in the family but you find out very quickly that it's not intuitive. You're defensive and cagey, caustic at times and generally not used to having friends who aren't just as abrasive as you are. Moving around a lot isn't great on the social life, and you've never been a social genius, even before the game. You think the only reason you got along with the trolls was because your type of dickishness is just par the course for their culture.

Regardless, you don't know how to grin, flirt, and be cute enough to sell these shots. You watch Nova flutter through three trays in the time it takes you to sell half of one, swishing his hips and smiling at customers like he isn't just as big an ill-mannered jerk as you are. Psh.

The twelve thirty rush hits, and you've barely finished your first tray. People approach you, look you over and try to initiate but you just aren't receptive, responding stiffly and unable to coax yourself into smiling the way the other boys can; they seem to just feel it out, somehow, but you haven't flirted with a stranger since you were a single teenager in the game and you've been in a committed relationship with your best friends for enough time that you've learned to not need social skills when it comes to other people.

You're starting to feel the palpable tinge of regret. You've seen some of the other boys drinking, and while you don't usually go for alcohol (Rose's breakdown on the meteor was a little bit traumatizing, yes) you wander helplessly over to the bar and look at the array of bottles and realize that your tastes don't have much variety beyond apple juice and you have no clue what you'd get.

“May I help you?” The phrasing is awful formal for a bartender, and you give the tall, dark-skinned woman a curious look.

“You related to Nova?” is the first thing that pops out of your mouth when you see the red dot on her forehead.

She raises her eyebrows. “Is that always the first question you ask upon finding out two people are from the same country?”

You are immediately entrenched in shame, enough that you let out an awkward laugh. “My bad, sis, my bad. Sometimes my mouth has a mind of its own, like how some dudes are with their dicks but my second brain's in my tongue, and it's like that Men In Black parasite alien—shit just comes out without me even thinkin' about it, yanno? Shit, bend me over and give my fine, glo-brite ass a spanking, I done fucked up.”

A faint smile hits her lips. You figure she probably didn't hear most of that over the din, but accepts your apology anyway. She nods her head at your shot tray. “Rough night?”

“In a manner of speaking,” you say.

“That still your first tray?” she asks. From anyone else it'd seem smug, but on her the question is just matter-of-fact. You try not to flip on the defensive.

One of your shoulders lifts in a shrug. “Yeah, turns out I got the sweet sugar cakes for miles but my flow needs hella work.” She lifts thin fingers to her mouth, muffling a laugh. You take the moment to appreciate her shorn black hair, perfectly gelled into a 20s-reminiscent swirl over flawlessly plucked brows. She's wearing no make-up. After inspection you can't imagine her and Nova being related, anyway—they're basically complete opposites. The narrow slope of her Roman nose reminds you of someone you knew but the memory is too painful and makes your heart throb so you shy away from the comparison, instead bobbing your head and saying, “Don't think I caught your name?”

“Kanti,” she says, thumbing one of her earrings absently. “Do you need a drink, or just moral support?” she asks—again, not unkindly.

You pitch a smirk at her and say, “I really shouldn't,” because you're so tight on money that the handful of dollars in your bag is for a burger off the nearest fast joint's value menu every night you can't handle your stomach growling after being empty all day, and wasting it all on a drink means sacrificing any and all after-work meals.

Kanti shakes her head. “No, by my assessment it might calm you down.”

“You callin' me up-tight, lady?”

“Not quite,” she says. “But nervous, yes.” You can't really refute that, so you don't try. “What would you like?”

“Look, I don't really drink, so I ain't got shit for knowledge when it comes to drinks—”

“What's your favourite fruit?”

“Apple juice,” you respond automatically, even though apple juice is a fruit byproduct and not a fruit itself.

Laughing again into her hand, Kanti tosses an invisible lock of hair out of her face and says, “I'll work with that. Go, work; I’ll wave you over when it's done.”

You feel more jittery, if possible, trying to empty your tray before Kanti summons you back, and by some miracle you get a fat, jolly human being of indiscriminate gender to suck up your last two shots and get a fiver and a slap on the ass for your trouble. You refer to them in your head as SantaQueer and walk back to the bar to collect your drink (or have an attack of guilt and refuse it because you can't afford to be wasting money on alcohol), squinting for the familiar face behind the dark lenses of your shades.

She's hovering by the darkest, quietest (by relative definitions of 'quiet') end of the bar, and you slip over on light feet, feeling very much like a skittish horse. She doesn't see you at first because her nose is buried in her phone; you watch her fingers as she texts rapidly, admiring her fine-boned wrists and clean, unpainted nails. You'd worry about appearances but she looks about as lesbian as they come so you figure you're safe from any accusations of flirting. In a surprisingly indelicate gesture, counterpoint to her previous poise, she jams her phone down the front of her shirt to rest between her ample breasts and looks up at you, smiling. “Finally cleared your tray, I see,” she says, tilting her head in a way that makes her earring twinkle in the flickering club lights.

“Yeah, some homogay who looked a helluvalot like a fetish Santa had it out for my poor virgin cheeks. He took one shot for each glute and sent me packing, the cat.”

“I believe I know who you're talking about,” she says, “and she prefers female pronouns.”

You raise an eyebrow. “I'll keep it in mind. Look, I'm, uh, not thinking I should drink, I don't have any cash on me--”

Kanti shakes her head. “Don't worry about it, dear—what's your name, again?”

You haven't decided on a proper stripper name. Some of the boys just use their real first names but you're paranoid to hell and back about it so you don't think you will. You considered 'Stride' but you think it sounds kinda toolish and is too close to your real name anyway. Panicking, you think of the most obnoxiously overdone thing that comes to mind, and somehow, “It's Destiny,” pops out of your mouth.

What the fuck. Ahahahaha.

She raises a slim eyebrow. “Destiny,” she repeats.

“Uh, yeah. Trying it out, yeah.”

You can tell she's trying not to laugh when she turns to reach for a shot glass sitting on the counter behind her, which she promptly sets in front of you. You give it a wary look, but she just pushes it a little closer, saying, “Try it. It tastes like apple cinnamon.”

“Does it have a shitty name like Sex on the Beach or Redheaded Slut?” you ask.

“I made it up,” she sniffs.

“You should name it, then,” you say, fingering the glass thoughtfully.

Kanti sets her index on her pouted bottom lip, looking up at the ceiling in mock contemplation. “Destiny's Apple Dream?” she guesses.

You guffaw, almost spilling the drink. “Needs work.”

“So do you,” she parries, then gestures toward the shot. “Now don't fret, I didn't use too much alcohol. Go on.” Your hand is halfway around the shot glass when Kanti flaps a hand in your direction, exclaiming, “Wait!”

You almost spill it all over yourself. “What?”

“Come here.”

“ _What?_ ”

“Just lean forward,” she stresses, wiggling her fingers toward herself. Wary, you lean forward, only to reel back when those pretty fingers approach your shades.

“Now just what in fuck's balls do you think you're doing?”

Kanti folds her arms indignantly. “No one who's anyone is going to be wooed by someone who's wearing dark sunglasses in a nightclub. Give them to me, I'll keep them under the counter until the end of the night.”

You shake your head, vehement. “The shades don't come off, sister. Sorry.”

“Try it. Just for an hour. If you don't do your next tray in half the time I'll make you another drink free of charge, though I don't doubt that I'm right. I always am.” She doesn't even have the gall to sound smug, which is something you're coming to like about her. She says things that would sound horribly arrogant on anyone else but in her voice just sound like indisputable facts.

You chew your lip. Bro would be ashamed—you're fairly sure he never did a show without his shades—but Bro died in an alternate universe and is never coming back and you aren't his tool and you never will be. You didn't survive the game to spend the rest of your life trying to hump the dead horse that is your brother's arbitrary rulebook even if it ends up shooting you in the foot, right?

You tell yourself that but your hands still shake when you slide the glasses off your eyes and hand them to Kanti. Everything inside you screams _wrong_ but when she folds them under the counter and you can finally _see_ again, part of you thinks maybe it wasn't a horrible idea. She smiles at you, and you can see the creases at the corners of her mouth and eyes when she does. You wonder how old she is, but don't ask. “Very nice,” she says approvingly. “You have beautiful eyes.”

“Thanks,” you say, still uncomfortable but forcing yourself to get over it.

“Okay,” she says, clapping her hands together. “ _Now_ go for it. And no more dawdling, I don't have all night.”

You don't point out that she was the one who stopped you a moment ago, and instead turn your nose down at the surprisingly fruit-scented liquid. Bracing yourself, you pluck the drink from the bar and lift it toward her in a mock toast. “If this kills me, I hope my ghost haunts you and you never sleep another night. You don't want to be haunted by a ghost named Destiny, dude, that shit's ratchet as fuck.”

“Just drink it!” she insists, and you do.

* * *

You sneak into the house at three AM, wallet swelling your back pocket with all the crumpled ones stuffed into it. You don't know who it was who put in a word for you, but last Thursday you got a call telling you to prepare routines for Friday and Saturday each, letting you know you'd be dancing your first performance within Prism's matronly walls.

You weren't doing too badly on shots after you got the hang of it—the advice from Kanti and Nova helped, plus free drinks and a few tips from the other boys, whom you hope are warming up to you—but once you hit the stage it was like being God Tier again. Invincible, you spun and swayed and ripped a dress shirt open and got a laugh and a slap on the back from the douchefaggot who offered you the job in the first place. Your dancing isn't as sensual as some of the other strippers but you can breakdance like a champ and people stop caring how seductively you sway your hips when you're doing windmills while wearing nothing but a jockstrap that barely contains your package.

Your haul was about double what you've been making the past two weeks and you're so mindlessly excited about it that you bounce on the toes of your worn high-tops when you slip into the door, locking it carefully behind you.

The television is on in the living room, but you jerk when you see a small body curled under a blanket on the couch. After squinting you see pale skin and white-blonde hair that matches your own. Rose's cheek is pillowed on a knit stuffed cat, wrist bent to delicately pin it against her face. She's all red from the position, hair mussed and headband askew. There's a bit of drool in the corner of her mouth, and instead of slipping into the bathroom to get changed before she can get a look at you, you swan onto the couch and wrap around her, wiping the drool off smudged black lips with your thumb. Usually she's taken her makeup off by now, so she must have fallen asleep some time ago without intending to.

She's so pretty and you're running on whatever the work version of oxytocin is, not quite as good as happy sex hormones but you'll take what you can get. You kiss her temple, down the swoop of her cheekbone into the hollow beneath, bypass her mouth and tuck her against your chest as you press your lips again and again to her jawline, trailing along the slender column of her throat, bared so beautifully for you by the position she fell asleep in.

Rose mumbles as she wakes up and you ruffle fingers through her hair, moving to mouth at her shoulder once you've successfully nosed aside her loose night shirt. “Mm,” she moans, stretching her back and pressing the curve of her skull into your shoulder. “Dave?”

“Yeah, baby, it's me, back from the grave. The power of your love has resurrected me.”

You get a faceful of Rose's palm for your trouble, but you only proceed to kiss all over her soft fingers, catching her around the wrist so you can drag kisses across the sensitive parts of her palm down to the inside of her arm. Rose's bemused snort turns into a soft hum, which is cue enough for you to draw her in, pulling her by the back of the neck until you can kiss her chin, her bottom lip, the side of her nose, waiting for her to twist her fingers into your hair and press her heart-shaped mouth to yours. You drink her in, kissing her slow and thorough and not bothering to complain about her sleep breath. “Hey, gorgeous,” you purr against her mouth, tongue flicking out to trace the seam of her lips.

Feisty to the end, she bites, catches your tongue at the tip, tugs a second before releasing it and claiming you for her own, now awake enough to shove your shades out of the way and tilt her head _just so_ , enough for her tongue to trace the back of your teeth and tickle your upper palate.

“You're home late,” is the first thing she says when you separate, voice low and scratchy, rumbling in her chest. It draws you in and you bury your face between her breasts, trying to follow the sound to its source deep inside her, like the edge of her tone could wrap horrorterror tentacles around your neck and suck you into the hollow of her chest cavity where you could listen to her lungs croon all day.

You might be somewhat blitzed. Kanti makes great drinks, and the hot DJ offered you a hit from her spliff when you ran into her in the parking lot and complimented her on her jams.

You're only a little buzzed and it doesn't matter because you take the bus home anyway, but Rose will definitely smell it on you. You give her a few seconds to figure it out and don't even make it down a five-four-three-two-one count before she asks, “Are you drunk?”

“Not completely,” you answer, nuzzling her sternum.

She absently pets your hair, no doubt allowing you an entertained twist of her lips. “I thought you didn't drink, O High and Mighty One. Has apple juice finally forsaken you?”

“No,” you mumble, “but it turns out appletinis are delicious. Did you know how many drinks you can make that taste like apple? I sure as fuck didn't, but there's this chick, she's gay don't worry, supermegahella gay, like I'm surprised I can even stop myself from vomiting out fish jokes every time I talk to her, but like I was saying she just makes up shit on the _spot_ for me, y'know, just whips shit up right there but her names for everything are horrible, like really bad, like thirteen-year-old me could do better with nothing but an empty can of coke and two week old GameBro parodies. It's so cheesy but it's half the fun of the experience, you know, like going to Disney World and getting bird shit in your hair while you're just trying to enjoy your mouse head-shaped elephant ear—” The rest of your statement comes out muffled because Rose has pulled you by your hair away from her breasts and placed her palm over your mouth.

Her eyes are deep and purple and intense, mascara smeared over the apples of her cheeks, lashes clumped. Her irises are so bright, shiny, like— “Dave.” Her voice is very, very calm. “What have you been doing.” You can hear the lack of a question mark. She says it like an accusation.

You shrink back. “Working, Rose. What else would I be doing, babe, you think I'm cheating on you-- Look, look I even got money in my wallet, I swear to god I ain't—”

“No, Dave,” she sighs, eyes flicking downward in a brief second of weakness. You don't doubt it's only because she's tired. “I trust you.” You don't quite huff out a breath of relief because you're waiting for the other bomb to drop. “But I want to know what you're doing.”

And there it goes.

“I'm _working_ ,” you whimper, hand fisted around your wallet, suddenly aware that it's pregnant with more singles than a welfare queen.

“I don’t doubt that,” she says, smoothing a hand over her skirt, “But I do doubt the story you told us. It doesn’t add up. You've spent far too much time outside the house and not enough on the computer for someone as preoccupied with editing as you usually are. You’re a graphic designer, and yet you allege you’re spending hours at the club every night.” You’re silent. “Dave. What aren’t you telling me?”

Your hands are shaking. Why the fuck is this so hard? “I _am_ working at the club. I didn’t lie about that.”  
  
“So you lied about something else.” Your mouth opens, then closes. You nod mutely. Rose’s hand settles on the back of yours, squeezing it. “Tell me. I won’t be angry.”

“They said I wasn’t good enough to be a DJ,” you admit. “Straight up, no holds barred. I was a porn star and he was the rock-hard stud jamming his Cock Of Truth right down my throat without even letting me tell the cameraman where I was from.” Rose nods, sympathetic. “He didn’t even want to hear my other stuff, the fucker didn’t even _listen_ , but he offered me a job.” You can tell she wants to ask but restrains herself, sitting patiently with her hands folded over yours. “I told him to get bent but then so much shit happened, Rose, and I didn’t have a choice, like my options were shitting in the middle of the street right in front of the White House or getting a colonoscopy live on camera in front of everyone who’d ever been on Jerry Springer, Maury, and Judge Judy combined.”

“Very dire circumstances,” she agrees.  
  
“Yeah.”  
  
“Dave.”

“What?”  
  
“Don’t stall. It’s late, and I have very important things to do tomorrow morning, such as ruminating on my lack of career and tending to the jalepeño garden.”

You squint down at her. “We have a jalepeño garden?”

“No.”

“Oh.” You scratch the back of your neck. “Rose, I’m a stripper.” Her eyes grow wide, and you wonder if that might not have been the best time to drop the news. It’s too late to take it back now, though.

Rose clears her throat. “Yes, of course, Dave.”

“No, I'm serious. The guy was a total lech and he said he wasn't interested in my tunes but perved on me like fuck and offered me a job as a professional slut.” Her eyebrows disappear behind her mussed up bangs. “I said no, of course, and then everything happened. I needed— we _needed_ income.” You open your wallet and pull out about one hundred and forty-five bucks in cash which you proceed to deposit into her lap. Slow, like she’s in a daze, Rose picks up the money and shuffles the bills between her fingers, feeling the worn paper and organizing them so they're all facing the same direction.

“This is all from one night?” she asks, still sorting the change.

“Yeah,” you say. “Usually I only make about eighty a night but since I've started dancing I pull in twice that. They told me I'd get more the longer I work there, people get favourites, y'know? The more people like you the more they'll tip you, and they'll specifically look for you to buy their shots from.” Fingers trembling, Rose sucks her bottom lip between her teeth. She holds your earnings in her hands, staring at it.

“You shouldn't have to do this.”

“Don't got a choice,” you say firmly.

Rose frowns. “No, that's not true. Far be it from me to eschew the merits of sex work, but you shouldn't force yourself into this just for us. We'll get by—”

“Rose, we're not fucking getting by.”

She tries to hand the money back but you jerk your hands away, scowling at her. “Don't you dare. It's yours.”

“What?”

“You paid off John's piano, great, we needed that done. But you shouldn't have to sacrifice your magic mind rapist clinic just because John's a big goober.”

“That isn't your call,” she says, voice sharp.

“Look,” you say, knocking the handful of bills back into Rose's lap and grabbing her hands. She tries to pull them away but you tighten your fingers around hers, holding her still. Her eyes are narrow and challenging but your mouth is a hard, unmoving line of indifference. You don't care about her objections or her jedi mind powers because she is going to fucking listen to you. “Everyone's made sacrifices, yeah? Some of us gave up school, some of us gave up the kind of work we wanted to do. Everyone got something— _except John_. John gave up everything for us and now it's my turn to give something back. So I'm a shitty DJ, that dream failed and I'm gonna have to man up and deal with it. I can't provide for us that way but I can sure as fuck give John a chance at doing better.”

She's finally silent, lips pursed and knuckles white. The room descends into darkness as Rose's movie ends and you give her hands a squeeze, peering at her in the dim light of the rolling credits. “This won't kill me, Rosie.” The nickname makes her snort but you don't let her comment on it, knowing it'd derail you. “You gotta let me handle this and not interfere, though I know minding your own damn business is like sawing off your own tentaboner with a nail file. John and Jade can't do everything on their own, sis; it's more than time for me to take some of the burden. Protect you guys. Y'all deserve it.”

There's a long moment of silence so pristine that you can hear the cogs working in her head over the faint hum of the orchestral credit music. “Lalonde,” you say, voice a bit louder. “Come on.”

“Why did you lie to us?” You almost don't stop yourself from laughing at her last ditch attempt to gather control of the situation. That's Rose for you—always wanting to have the upper hand, always trying to throw you off balance so she can catch you by your heartstrings, pull out your stitches and inspect your insides in some macabre emotional vivisection.

Your palms fit to the curve of her face and you huff out a breath, realizing belatedly that you're shaking, too. “I didn't want you to feel guilty.”

“We deserve to know. You have to tell—”

“ _No_ ,” you say forcefully. “No fucking way, and you keep your trap shut, too.”

“Why not?” Rose challenges, petulant.

You drop your hands, moving to rake them through your hair. “They wouldn't understand.”

“That’s an entirely unfair assumption. When have Jade and John been anything but supportive?”

You groan, “That's the _point_. And, well, also _not the point_.” Rose's expression turns dubious. “Jade was raised in a fucking jungle. By a _dog_. What do you think she—and John, for that matter—think of when they hear about strippers? The shit they see in media; cocaine binges, being cut into chunks and dumped in a river, all sorts of skeeved out self loathing and self abuse shit—”

“I don't think you're giving them enough credit—”

“John was raised to be some perfect Ultra Dad Husbando shit. He didn't go through hell and back just to end up dating some guy who has to strip to support the family. I don't even know if he could think about it without associating it with me being unfaithful—which is not fucking true, by the way, just about everyone who works there knows I'm in a committed relationship.” Rose gives you a disapproving look but you move into pleading, voice husking when you say, “Don't tell them. Please, just let them believe I have the tiniest fucking iota of integrity left and don't ruin this for me. Just—”

“Shhh,” says Rose, folding two fingers over your lips. “It's okay. I...promise.”

“Pinky swear,” you insist.

Meticulous and slow, Rose selects one of your hands and rubs her fingers over the knuckles of your first three fingers, smoothing them down. She hooks her index beneath your pinky, prodding it erect and then elegantly raising her own. You let out a breath you hadn't known you were holding when your fingers entwine and Rose murmurs, “Cross my heart,” bending to kiss the exposed knuckle of your littlest finger.

You lean to kiss hers in response, whispering “thanks” into her soft skin.

“You should sleep,” Rose says, keeping your hands linked as she reaches out with the other to brush your bangs away from your face.

“You, too.” You don't wait for her response, instead pulling your hand free and using it to scoop under her knees, plucking her off the couch and rocking her against your chest. Obligingly, Rose wraps her arms around your neck, lips grazing your jaw. The television across the room goes blue, then black as the DVD ends. You carry her into the bedroom where John and Jade are already asleep, clad in nothing but underwear and curled together under a sheet like kittens.

Kicking the cover down with your foot, you set Rose behind Jade like you're aligning spoons, watching their curves click together, magnetic and perfect. You slide in behind her, slipping under the sheet and wrapping your arm as far around all three of them as you can reach.

* * *

The beginning of your second month at Prism comes hard and fast and sloppy, much like a wet dream. You've been complimented for being a fast learner, you're doing better on your shots (still not as good as you could be, not as good as you are at the dancing, but you're working on it), and you've managed to rope in a few allies within the club.

You've made a little over one thousand dollars in just a month and you're doing fine, so fucking fine. It's amazing to be pulling in a paycheck, even better to get a taste of the crowd, even if you're on the wrong end of the stage.

“Come here,” says Yazmin, stabbing you with her cane with one hand as she gropes for your face. You smirk at her comically thick glasses, dodging out of the way. “I'll find you,” she says menacingly, “Don't think I won't.”

You didn't actually know that she was legally blind the first few times you met her, but apparently in the club it's bad enough that she has to use her cane, which is the blatant hint that ended up tipping you off. In adequate light she can avoid running into anything enough to get from wherever she is to her driver's vehicle, and other than transportation she's fairly independent. She's intense and bouncy and has really hardcore blue hair because she can see blotches of shadow and colour even if nothing else is clear to her and claims that it pleases her when she looks into a mirror and sees nothing but a squashed blueberry staring back.

Her spinning is also way more radical than yours. You almost don't feel bad about being turned down for the position because Yazmin is the most killer DJ in half inch thick spectacles you've ever seen.

Obligingly, you dip your head back in, if only to avoid getting nailed in the ankle bone when she sweeps her cane around in search of you. “Your hair is a mess,” she chastises, raking her fingers through it critically. “There's no excuse for this.”

Your hair _is_ a mess, because you missed the bus and had to jog to work and got all sweaty in the process. You allow Yazmin to fuss with it because somehow she manages to get it to look great despite not being able to fucking _see_ , and because her calloused fingers rubbing at your scalp is a great chill-down before you hit the floor. Yaz produces a pot of gel and works it through your damp hair, squinting ineffectually but mostly arranging it by touch. It's surprisingly effective.

You've stopped wondering at the confusing myriad of similarities between your coworkers and old, long-lost friends. It's easier not to think about the implications, easier not to hope. You accept Yazmin and Kanti's fussing, bitch amiably with Nova and enjoy their attempts to make your life easier, even if that technically includes your pervy boss.

Between Yazmin picking at your hair every night she runs into you and Nova (who also comes from a poor background) giving you tips on low-budget outfits you've been rocking this gig, really and truly, and you're fucking soaring. The smiling yellow pill Yazmin slips you with a wink also helps.

“Are you dancing tonight?” she asks.

“Yeah, I'm second. Right before Nova.”

Yazmin snickers, her cane spinning in her hand. “Good for you, now you can get some tips before he shows you up and steals the rest.” She isn't wrong; the person who goes after Nova is consistently short changed because everyone's throwing their dollars at him and aren't feeling quite as generous afterward. You got the position two nights in a row last week but someone else pissed the boss off and so they got the slot of shame today.

You laugh it off, tone cocky when you say, “Yeah, for now. Just give me a couple more weeks and that faggot'll have some stiff competition.”

“ _Something's_ gonna be stiff alright,” she says, eyebrows waggling.

“Yeah,” comes Nova's voice from behind you, “Like the broom handle I'm gonna ram up Destiny's ass.”

“Don't be so pressed, brother,” you say as your hands link in some elaborate stripper handshake. You slap him on the back, asking, “Ready to show another ten dozen strangers your asscrack tonight?”

He snorts. “You know it.”

Jerking a thumb toward Nova, you say to Yazmin, “He made me buy a jock, did I tell you? That shit was the most uncomfortable I've ever been in front of a crowd, I think my balls practically crawled back up into my body I was so nervous about 'em slipping out.” She guffaws, but Nova only rolls his eyes.

“Keep fucking laughing, I can't hear you over the sound of how much money I make, because the men like it.”

“Men are nasty.”

“You only think that because you're a disgusting bisexual.”

Chuckling, you offer him a lazy thumbs up. “Dick's best when it tastes like pussy.”

“Don't make me vomit,” Nova says, then slaps you on the ass. “Get changed, you lazy shit. We open in five and you're wearing too many clothes.”

“Sorry, babe, 'm spoken for,” you say, throwing him a wink before you shuffle off to the corner of the dressing room to cram yourself into the neon pink briefs Rose bought you for the occasion. You aren't sure how gimmicky you're allowed to get yet, but so far your ironic pink duds and excessive use of sparkly 3D fabric paint has gone over pretty well, and no one's said anything about the fact that your new high-tops are covered in silver sequins. You're not really that flambouyant in attitude or nature; you don't swish your hips like Nova and your accent is way more 'repressed Texan' than 'lisping homo,' but you enjoy slouching around in glitter for the performance aspect of it, and it's not like anyone here is _judging_ you. You take advantage of the freedom and the fact that you don't have to hide your tattoos, maintaining that as long as they let you you'll go as wild as you please.

So far it only seems to be benefiting you, so you go heavier and harder every time you get a new idea. If stripping to 'Save a Horse, Ride a Cowboy' while wearing (borrowed) leather chaps isn't a good way to endear yourself to queers, you don't know what is.

You usually don't fuck with make-up, if only because Nova says you don't need it and because you can't do it good enough to not look like you fell into a trashbin full of clown paint, so you're in your neon panties in a minute and a half, inspecting your flawlessly styled hair and preparing to collect your shots. You slam into the crowd with high energy, whirling through your first tray and then half of a second. Nova sticks his tongue out at you when you pass him, and you're already a little high but Kanti shoves something in a pretentious little glass at you and it smells like candy so you swallow it in one gulp and do your best to awkwardly flirt your way through the remaining half of your tray before Yazmin's voice comes over the speakers, gleefully announcing showtime.

You follow the other boys backstage, join a gaggle of half dressed queers and painted queens. You wrestle yourself into a pair of liberally ripped jeans and a see-through wifebeater bearing the words “I Dub To Fuck Step” on it.

The queen hosting tonight's show steps out, gathers applause and cheers, rouses the crowd. The opening dancer goes on. He does okay, but it's a rough crowd and they aren't as interested in his 2006-reminiscent LED gloves and raver flails. You bounce on the toes of your sequined shoes, say “there's no place like home,” and then bite your lip when your number gets called.

“Prepare your bodies, boys, for Deeeestiny!” The rolling announcer's bellow gives way to the opening chords of your song, and you picture Yazmin giving you a thumb's up from the booth.

You picture Rose, dark lips and bright eyes, silk-soft hair and patient smile standing in the audience, silently cheering you on. (You don't let yourself picture John or Jade, too convinced that neither of them would fit in this new area of your life.)

You wander onstage, a parody of looking lost and clueless as Dev spits out some phat beats. Someone hoots when you appear, a voice that you recognize as Kanti's.

The first line hits and you spring to life, jerking your hips in a circle and pulling a ‘Single Ladies’ strut. _DJ put that record on, that's my song, that's my shit_ \-- _Poppin’ Henny XO, all these hoes on my dick_. They certainly are on your dick, and you’re reeling more in with a slap to the inside of your knees and sensual fingers sliding up your thighs to lovingly pet over the fastening of your pornographically loose jeans.

You don’t twerk but Dev sings _‘bet you wanna see this booty bounce’_ and you give a little swagger, shifting your weight onto one foot and letting one cheek do what the lady says, just enough to tease them. The end of the chorus slides in and you hit the stage with a body roll hot enough to make a man fall in love.

Too bad, gents, Dave Strider is already thrice taken. Fuck yeah.

Even if no one in this joint knows your real name, you still mouth the next part with Dev’s name replaced for yours, muttering, “They call me Dave, I ain't your average bitch--” along with the music, mostly because you like stroking your own boner, but also because gays love a pantomime and you give the people what they love.

Dev ain’t too pretty to slap a ho and you start dancing for real, pushing your shirt up your toned abdomen as you toprock a bit, getting it just high enough to flash a nipple before you let it fall, giving the crowd a winning smirk and throwing yourself to the floor. You catch your weight on your hands, constrict your muscles into a freeze with your legs in the air then let yourself fall, landing in a bridge. The burn in your abdomen is furious as you flex, straightening your torso as your legs spread into a partial front split. You bounce to the music, undulating up and down before you twist and land into a full straddle, rocking forth to hump the stage in perfect syncopation with _base-ball bat_.

You feel each beat like you do a unit of time--that’s always been it, really, whether composing or dancing you _live_ the music, the way it takes up space on the timeline, organizes seconds into consonance and makes every moment too short, too long. You fist your hands in your shirt’s hem, slide your belly along the floor as you pull out of it and arch your back until your head bumps the stage, hands coming to rub at your pectorals.

Your spine is liquid, rolling fluidly as you trace down your stomach to undo your fly. You touch yourself like everyone in the club should want to touch you, delirious on your own hellacious pheromones.

The customers have thrown a few bills at you already, but most of them are clutching folded ones in their hands, begging for a scrap of your attention. You scout out a few fives but nothing higher, which means you need to step up your game. You know Nova gets at least one twenty per night and has reeled in fifties before, and you can be hells of competitive in the right circumstances.

Along the sides of the stage are railings to corral the crowd, give dancers space and also hold drinks. You pick a cutie and strut over, keeping your footwork as light and effortless as you can, and then with only a second to clear your way, lift yourself up onto the narrow shelf, a thumb in your jeans to offer your neon pink underoos for their approval. Their face glows in the light as they look up at you, tucking their offering into the band. You grin, ruffle their hair, and then brace yourself.

You fall back, heels hooked into the lip of the railing as you land on your hands and vibrate your whole body, arms flexing to support your weight. The screams and hoots deafen you as you kick off, pulling your hands away from the floor just in time to land squarely on your feet.

It’s not even dancing, some of it. You know how to fall, and how to land, and how to recover from body shock, and you put every inch of your training to use, popping a handless cartwheel and falling to your knees, shoving your jeans down your hips. Taking off pants is hard to do sexily but you give it your best shot, folding yourself in half as you draw the garment off your legs, leaving you clothed in nothing but your day-glo-bright briefs.

A couple back-breaking undulations later and you’re accepting dollars, kissing cheeks, throwing a knee up on the railing to roll your pelvis at an extremely lucky patch of air. More dollars; you make your way to someone who’s laid themselves under the railing, a ten between their lips. You show the rest of the crowd your ass as you straddle them, slide down into a split over their stomach and give them a ride, leaning forward to whisper lyrics in their ear, all, “Ridin' in the saucy whip, never give a fuck it don't cost me shit. I'm a gangster baby—just kidding.” You pull back and take the tenner in your teeth, pushing yourself up to crawl off your victim.

_Oh. No. She. Didn't._

“Can’t do it like me,” boasts Dev, and you breathe those words, you live it, you make it true. Your dick is riding its own public rodeo in these underwear and yeah, they _wish_ they could do it like you.

You have money shoved in the front and the back of your briefs, crumpled dollars littering the stage at your feet as you drop an effortless flare, legs kicking high. You spin on your hands, then you’re down again, making sweet, fervent love to the floor. It’s prom night and the stage is your sweet seventeen-year-old mistress, dressed in a floor-length gown stuffed with so much tulle you’ll have to send out a search party to find her vag when you bang her in the back of your dad’s car, right there in the venue parking lot.

 _Now I’m feelin’ so fly like a G6_ —You actually fly, switching between grind-and-thrusting and spins, kicks, swipes; you own the floor, it’s yours, no take-backs. Your fingers thread into the tie some dude is wearing, you pull him down so his face meets your crotch, let him say an intimate hello for a second before you discard him and pull a handful of dollars out of his weakened fingers.

Winding down, you legit let your ass do the work for you, backing your way down the stage until you’re bent all the way over, wrists brushing the sequins on your shoes as you bounce on the balls of your feet and make everything you got shake to the rhythm. Someone slaps your left cheek and you honestly don’t even care.

You come out of yourself in a way you haven’t been able to do since the game, letting go of insecurities and rules and just _being_ , except instead of fighting, instead of saving your friends’ lives because there’s no other choice other than _keep moving, keep slaying_ , you’re saving them in a different way.

You’re alive. You’re fucking alive and you throw yourself into a pose for the ending chord as Yazmin’s voice comes over the speaker, yelling, “Give it up for Destiny!”

Limbs shaking, brow dotted with sweat, you manage to break your pose and stand up. You’re numb as you gather your clothes, as you dodge the person assigned to help collect your tips and other accoutrement. You shimmy off the stage and Nova catches you in a tight hug, kissing your cheek and hissing “good job, twink” into your ear.

“Back at you,” you make yourself say, but it gets lost in the din.

You haven’t given up on your hopes of becoming a DJ, but this elation, this _power_ running through you is intoxicating in a way that makes the temporary sacrifice worth it. You want to rewind time and go back to relive that dance again and again, hide yourself in the shadows of the club and watch yourself rock, doing something that for once is _wholly and entirely yours_.

A massive bundle of bills is placed in your hand. You make a fist, take a breath, listen to the crowd roar as Nova struts onstage.

You move backstage to collect your shot tray, only one thought on your mind:

It’s worth it.


	2. two

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning: There are a few mild instances of sexual assault mentioned in this chapter, including one attempted domestic assault which becomes a major plot point. There are no explicit details and the behaviour is neither condoned nor fetishized. This is not an erotic non-con story and all actions taken by characters will have realistic consequences.

John’s face is between Jade’s thighs when you push open the bedroom door, left ajar, and stumble through, smearing the back of your wrist against your eyelashes under the rim of your shades. You don’t see where they land when you toss them in the general direction of the dresser because your eyes are closed and you’re falling into plushy blackness, landing face-first into the futon with your forehead pressed tight into the crook of your elbow.

“Um,” says Jade.

“Dude,” John says, voice muffled as he wipes his mouth with his palm. “Are you okay?”

You grunt. Speech is not a thing you can handle right now, despite the concerned looks you're imagining them giving you. Picturing them is easier than looking at their true forms, so you keep your face buried away from your partners, huffing a tense breath into the mattress. You hear shifting—probably Jade and John doing an awkward 'get out from incriminating sex positions so we can comfort Dave!' tango. Great. It's almost enough to make you regret coming to bed. _Almost_ , because you are exhausted and it's nearly four o'clock in the morning and where the fuck is Rose, even? Sometimes John disappears during sexy time but you've never known Rose to miss out on eating pussy; it's basically her life's calling.

“Where's Rose?” you ask, rolling onto your side so you can pull your shirt over your head.

John and Jade exchange bemused glances, though Jade's face is more upset and John looks more perplexed than anything. “Don't change the subject, you stupid dumb,” Jade eventually says, turning back to you. You take the opportunity to crawl out of your jeans, shedding them like a skin as you slink half-naked under the comforter.

Safely ensconced in thick fabric, you mutter, “Not changing nothing, brosis.” Jade punches you in the calf and you don't have the energy to fake a noise of pain, even if it does actually hurt a little. “Just wonderin' where Rosie Posie got to while y'all were submerging your sinful material forms in a vat of briskly boiling blissful carnality, is all.”

“I appreciate the alliteration,” a voice says from the doorway, “but I assure you, I did not intend to miss the event. I was making tea.”

“Sure,” you say, reluctantly peeking outside of your cloth prison to see Rose’s fancy pink lingerie. Ah. So it’s one of those nights. “I got it. Good head and a fresh cuppa, it could only get better with some scalding two degree burns all over your—”

“Dave's being a jerk,” Jade complains, directing an accusatory jab at the unmoving lump otherwise known as your body.

Rose's eyebrows lift. “Is he, now? John, can you corroborate this claim?”

It takes him a moment to repress a snorfle, but John eventually nods. “Total dumbass,” he agrees.

“Fuck you,” you say, dragging the comforter over your head. “I'm just tired, alright? Can you let me sleep or is that not a good enough explanation.”

“Ah. Work must have been difficult,” Rose says, tone deceptively sympathetic. Fuck her twice, you think bitterly. She knows exactly why you're exhausted, even if she isn’t yet privy to the details of your day. Rose might— _might_ , you never know how her seering is going to work—not know specifically that you messed up a flare during your routine, or that Kanti was out sick and you didn't have anyone to talk to when a customer tried to give you a drugged shot. Rose probably doesn't know that someone groped you more than intimately or that someone else threatened to kill you when you were leaving the club, but she knows enough about what it's like to work as a gay stripper in Houston to know, without question, that work was probably rough.

Which makes her a bitch (predictably so) for playing it off like you just had a dead crowd. You're eternally grateful that she doesn’t subject you to Jade and John’s judgment and instead only treats you with their pity.

They’re giving you concerned looks but after some difficulty you surface a hand and use it to flap at them dismissively. “Don’t worry about it,” you grumble. “Just a tough night. No one buying the fancy ass shit I designed the display for, my visuals didn't go over too well. I’ll get over it.”

You don't really want to talk about it, nor do you want to dwell on it. You don't need comfort or healing hugs. Yeah, it sucks, but you don't need an angstfest to ruminate on the shittiness of your job situation. Working at Prism doesn't suck one hundred percent of the time. Last weekend was actually pretty fantastic, but the reality of sex work is a constant fluctuation. The usual instability of life quality is even more tumultuous when your product is your attractiveness, when you're bartering with your body. Fast food work might suck but it doesn't have the power over your self esteem that this does; you get paid the same shit no matter what you look like, but stripping is... obviously different. You can't _afford_ off days. Off days mean your body isn't worth the price of a shot.

You've always had issues with self worth. That's your brother's fault, mostly. Bro had unique ways of being supportive—which is to say, he wasn't. Competition with John did nothing beyond giving you something to do, and you spent most of the game only taking initiative when you had no other choice.

Now you don't even have sick moves, the domination of a virtual stock market, or crappy prize game constructs to make you feel better here and there. It's just a neverending parade of cold hard reality slapping you repeatedly in the face like a half flaccid old man dick as it introduces you to the inevitable horrors of erectile dysfunction.

It's okay, though, because you can handle it. Like a wave of the bitterest jizz life's crusty, sagging balls could produce, you swallow this terrible mouthful of misfortune like the champiest champ who ever champed. A good sport, it's you.

After all, it's what you gotta do for your family.

Now if only they'd _leave you the fuck alone_.

“If you need to talk, we can—”

“No,” you cut in, sharper than intended. “I just want to sleep.”

There's an awkward silence that threads between the four of you, and you're almost ready to drag yourself out of bed to go sleep in the den when Rose clucks her tongue. “Of course. Mr. Egbert, Ms. Harley, I suggest we adjourn to different quarters, hm?”

“Yeah, I guess,” agrees John, the futon's frame creaking as he pushes off.

Jade doesn't answer for a few seconds. You get curious enough to sneak a glance just as she swings forward to press a kiss to your temple. She doesn't say anything but she takes Rose's hand when it's offered, allowing Rose to pull her from the bed and out the door.

The last thing you register is Rose blowing you a kiss before you let your head slump against the pillow and fall into a restless sleep.

* * *

Your eye has been twitching up a storm all night. You've stared at it in mirrors enough to be pretty sure it isn't a visible phenomenon but regardless you're self conscious about the way your vision blinks in and out with each throb.

A finance you did not expect as a side effect of working this job was… underwear. You spend so much of your time in it that you really have to make sure everything is new, everything is trendy, and you can’t wear the same thing too many times. It’s absolutely absurd, especially after buying groceries and paying rent, that you have to waste twenty more bucks on panties. That twenty bucks could have paid for at least one of the new boots Jade needs (yeah, she still hasn’t gotten them). Nova’s never repeated his initial underwear-sharing gesture, but he does text you sometimes, demanding deets on the outfits you’re planning for the weekend. Originality, he maintains, is key. The sex industry is a sea full of carbon copies and standing out is the best bet for someone hoping to avoid being eaten alive by the neverending wave of manic sex pixies.

You didn’t really have money this week to buy new underwear so you’re back in the less-funny-now neon pink pair; you get pissed when Nova looks at them and scoffs while you’re all in the dressing room. You get angry because not fucking everyone can afford to buy expensive brand name briefs every goddamn week, because Nova might have _been_ poor but that doesn’t mean he is _anymore_ , and he has no right to judge you for anything you do, even if your fading sequin hightops and 90s jelly bracelets aren’t really as cute as they were the first few times around.

That’s okay. It doesn’t matter. Your baggy grey fishnet tank and watermelon lip gloss keep you steady, remind you of the part that you’re supposed to play here. Flighty and femme and cool, that’s what your customers like. They want you distanced but pretty; a tease. Four months and you’re learning how to play the game, even if the cash you make is running through your fingers like water, even though you’ve only been able to give Rose less than two thousand dollars. You’ll make it.

You aren’t making tips for shit tonight, even though people are buying your shots. Few of them are your regulars, most of them just think you’re cute. After your third tray you only have eighteen dollars in tips and that’s after two hours on the floor. More than minimum wage, but pathetic compared to reeling in over twenty bucks an hour in shot tips alone.

The unfamiliar DJ announces showtime and you disappear back into the dressing room to throw on some tacky gold lamé pants and exchange the fishnet tank for a black crop-top displaying a gold screenprinted roaring tiger across your skinny chest.

Nova’s first and you’re fifth, so he’s gone and back before you even leave the dressing room. You’re fidgeting around, clipping your nails, which you just realized looked _disgusting_. You shot a quick text to Rose, even, asking her thoughts on nail polish. She hasn’t answered yet.

The rest of the boys clear out, the three before you getting backstage while you and the few other dancers hang out along the make-up wall. Nova is a few seats down from you, curling his eyelashes. You let the silence go for a few minutes—he hasn’t talked to you yet today, aside from his brief shitty condescension—before you throw him a sidelong glance and mutter, “Hey.”

“Hey.” He doesn’t even look at you.

You fidget. “How’s the floor treating you tonight?”  
  
“Same old,” he sighs, grabbing a vial of glossy lip paint. He slathers it on liberally, lips pursed for the mirror.

“Cool, yeah,” you nod, scratching behind your ear with a jagged, badly clipped fingernail. “Hey, do you think nail polish would dry between now and the time I go dancing, because—”  
  
“No,” says Nova, not waiting for you to finish.

You keep talking anyway. “—well, okay, next dance. Next one, aight? I could slap on some glittery polish; my girlfriend always bitches about how hard that shit is to get off, I bet it’ll gain me some hella cred with the femmes in the audience tonight. Like, here have a fiver, go buy yourself some fucking nail polish remover, you slag. All sorts of dough raked in from the poor sods envisioning me going home and crying on the toilet as I desperately try to dig sparkles out of my cuticles, like some sort of gruesomely shiny massacre.”

Nova puts down the applicator and stares at you blankly, thick eyebrows furrowed into a knot. You know you should stop but you can’t; you’re like that chick from Mean Girls except thank God you weren’t cursed enough to be born a ginger, as if the gangliness and the freckles were enough on their own. You keep talking, even though your fingers are curled up into a fist, nails making uneven crescents on your palm. “I mean there’s basically no way for this plan to not work—I just need—”

“Des.”

“—nailpolish, oh sweet chemicals smeared all over my unpractised fingers, this is going to be an adventure—”  
  
“Fucking shut up, Destiny.”  
  
You blink. “Dude,” you protest. Your hands hurt.

“Shut the fuck up,” Nova repeats, “I literally cannot handle you right now.”

“Was jus’ tryin’ to lighten the mood,” you mumble, hunching your shoulders. You feel achingly alone without Rose or John or Jade with you; the four of you are so codependent now that the only time you aren’t with at least one of them is when you’re at work, and if it weren’t for the precious few friends you made here you’d feel isolated all the time. Nova’s rejection is… well.

Nova throws his hair out of his face and curls his lip in a snarl (that looks just like Karkat’s used to—no, no, you promised yourself you wouldn’t go down this road. These people are not your friends, no matter the similarities). “There’s no _mood_ to lighten. I can’t deal with your shit right now, end of story.”

You almost jerk to your feet, but you notice the room has gone a little bit quieter than before, which means _someone_ has noticed your conversation. You don’t want to alert the rest, so instead you set your face so it’s carefully blank and ask, “Who pissed in your applejuice?”

Not one to take cues of subtlety (so much like Karkat, so uncanny) Nova slams his hand on the counter and spins away from the mirror to scowl at you. “You don’t want to fuck with me tonight, faggot, so I suggest you take a hint.” Your face almost breaks into a reproachful grimace but you keep it reeled in, and after an enraged moment of staring into your bland nothingness Nova says, “Fuck this, you know what? Fuck you,” and storms out of the dressing room.

Silence suffocates the room. You’re reminded of the one time you died after an ogre pushed you into LOHAC’s lava; this feels remarkably similar. One of the other boys—you don’t know him so well, but he’s a nice kid—José, gives you a caged look, mutters something to himself, and then says, “You know his grandma’s in the hospital, right?”

You stop. Nova lives with and cares for his grandma, which is why he still works nights at the club instead of finding a better job. He’s with her all day—at least you’re pretty sure, though not entirely. He might have a second job. Regardless, you… didn’t know that. He just plain didn’t say anything. “No,” you answer, because José is waiting for acknowledgement. “He ain’t told me jack,” you admit.

José shrugs. “Just try not to give him any more shit.”

You _weren’t_ giving him shit, though, you were just _talking_ , but you don’t say anything. You just duck your head quickly, frowning. You wouldn’t know what to say even if you felt like talking, so you just keep quiet and scratch your knuckles with irritatingly sharp nails and wait for Qhris to be announced.

That’s when you hear it, though. Two songs before yours, you catch the opening of your track. You swear it was Julius onstage last, it can’t be your turn already. You get up so quickly you knock over your chair and flashstep out of the room, not caring what the other boys think. When you get backstage you don’t see an awkwardly empty floor, though. You see Qhris, rocking out with his choreography, which just so happens to be to the same song as yours.

You aren’t sure how to make an objective decision on whose choreography was better. All you feel is cold, raw panic.

Usually you go for old or obscure songs. Songs some people will know, maybe even most people, but that are so old that no one would consider dancing to them now. You pick classics, and not-so-classics, and just weird shit that you think would be funny, but regardless of your choices you stay away from popular, current music.

DJ Snake’s “Turn Down For What” was hilarious enough to change your mind. You thought it’d be kitschy enough that no one would expect a strip routine to it, yet people would still be excited to hear the song.

You, Dave Strider, tempted fate, and fate roiled up one hell of a shart and let it loose right on your birthday cake. Shit.

While booking it to the side of the club you can barely think, desperately cobbling together a routine in your head. What are you going to do? You can’t dance to the same song. Why didn’t anyone _tell_ you?

You have a million questions and zero answers but it doesn’t matter by the time you’ve pushed your way through to the DJ booth. You slip inside because you need to get a new track, you can’t afford to be sloppy seconds, you need something good. But _what?_

Despite debating between oldschool Madonna, Cher, and Queen, you end up picking a Fame-era Lady Gaga hit that you hope will complement your outfit enough to make it look like you planned this. The DJ (unfamiliar, just the slightest bit judgmental) argues with you a bit but eventually agrees to change your song.  You only barely get backstage by the time it’s your turn, bursting out a little too enthusiastically.  You give it a college try, but your routine is random and your moves are less impressive than usual.

It particularly shows in your tips.

Partway through a handstand you slip on sweaty palms and a grimy stage, lose your sight because your eye starts twitching under the stress and half a second later you’re falling, half a second later you’re plummeting off the edge of a steel girder toward hot fire and your God Tier powers won’t work, you can’t harness your flight and you’re going to die.

The whole world is inky blackness and shivering tentacles and a sharp beak made of darkness personified and the only way you catch yourself is on pure instinct and for a moment too long you can’t move because waiting in that void are a thousand dead Daves from endless failed timelines, and if you move they’ll see you; with their empty eyes they’ll seek you out and they’ll pull you into their mass and stick you full of holes and let your bloated airless body float forever among them in the unforgiving void of space, just another dead Dave, except holy _shit_ you’re still onstage.

You play it off. On autopilot, gestures stiff, you fan yourself like you _meant_ to do that. You throw in some contemporary dramantics, stumbling around the stage and clutching yourself like the transition from club dancing to classical was completely planned.

A regular gives you a fiver out of pity and that’s the last tip you make for the rest of your routine. You avoid Nova’s eyes when you stumble back into the dressing room because he’s not a bad guy and if you see pity instead of scorn you’ll break down and cry.

Your life has had enough flashbacks that you’ve accepted that apparently Striders _do_ have manly sob sessions on occasion, when it’s appropriate, especially when intimate childhood trauma is involved. Your place of employment is not an appropriate place to have a breakdown, however, so you maintain your dignity and hold back. Barely.

The second routine of the night is lackluster, though not because you didn’t practise or because your choreography was bad. You didn’t have another music fiasco to contend with and Spice Girls’ “Wannabe” is always a hit. Just… your heart wasn’t in it. Not even your head was in it. You couldn’t act the part because you reverted back to your poker face. It’s the only way you’re unbreakable.

Bro tried to help the squishy parts of you atrophy but the only fossils you have are on your shelves and there was just too much damn softness inside you for it to all go away. You have to be hard on the outside so all that squishy stuff doesn’t squeeze out the cracks in your façade, you have to be blank as a rock face because you’ll never be completely solid; your armour is flawed and you have to compensate for that, guard your weaknesses and pray to twelve blasphemous constellations that maybe nobody will notice the glaring path that leads right to your heart.

Calling yourself a failure would be pretty severe but you’re not really sure there’s another word for it.

“Kanti,” you say, and the only reason you don’t sigh the word is because it’s too loud for her to hear you otherwise. “I really need a drink.”  
  
“What?” Her voice is faraway, absent as she rapidly fingers through bills, flicking them into their proper spots in the register.

“I need a drink,” you repeat.  
  
“Honey, I can’t hear—”  
  
“I _need a fucking drink_ ,” you snap, raising your voice more than strictly necessary. Kanti’s finally looking at you, blinking in question. You sag against the bar. “Sorry, sorry. I just— need—”

“A drink,” she finishes dryly.

“...yeah.”

Kanti looks you up and down, considering, but someone else waves her over and she walks away without another word. You’re forced to continue trying to clear off your shot tray, which isn’t going super well because your face is on lockdown and even the few regulars you recognize are asking you where your smile’s at. Not that you ever really _smile_ , but you frown significantly less. It’s a delicate balance, okay.

It’s ten minutes before you make it back to the bar, feeling more haggard and grizzled than an old witch in a Disney film. You wait five additional minutes before Kanti makes her way over to you, but before you can get a word out she shushes you with a calmly raised hand. “I don’t have time tonight, Des,” she says, so mild you almost don’t hear her. “I’m sorry. Some of us need to focus on our work.”  
  
Then she’s gone, down the bar to help another customer.

You should have known. They’re busy tonight, anyway. Very busy. You need… to clear off your shot tray. Yeah. You’re just going to, to do just that.

Everything feels like it’s covered by two inches of cotton and you’re alone and you have no one and nothing, the night dragging on in an endless chain of damp dollar bills and making awkward change, of crumpled jello shot cups and a stain of spilled alcohol down your exposed thigh.

When your shift is finally over it’s two thirty in the AM and you have barely enough money in your pocket to justify paying bus fare here and back. You walk to the bus stop, wait for an hour.

The bus doesn’t come.

There’s no one around so you let yourself cry, bent against your knees with your shades pushed up around your forehead and your thumb cradling your temple, nose pressed into the hollow of your palm as it slimes up with tears and snot. You end up calling John, waking him up and asking him to come get you.

You don’t explain why. He manages to keep himself from asking.

The car pulls into the driveway, choked with silence. Parks. John hovers a hand over the gear shift, then sets it back down. You stare at his knuckles for an uncomfortable amount of time. He looks up, trying to meet your eyes, but you are behind a solid wall of opaque glass and you close your eyes anyway, willing him not to try and feel you out. He makes a terse, joking offer to carry you inside like a rescued princess. When you shake your head and fiddle with the handle (this one’s tricky, you have to pull it just right—) he asks tentatively if you’re going to faint.

You don’t have it in you to play along, so you step out of the car. John’s lips purse, and he follows you.

Although you want to do nothing more than strip down to bare skin and crawl into your bed like returning to the womb you never technically emerged from, your jacket stays on. The clothing underneath it is highly circumspect and you’re in no state to field questions. You wait until you’re in the dark bedroom to place the closet door between you and John, whipping your jacket and shirt off in one smooth gesture before he can even catch a glance.

The gold lamé pants put up a bit more of a fight, but John isn’t the most fashion-minded person and you aren’t exactly the type to _not_ wear tacky, overwhelming shit on occasion, so even with that minor setback the night is looking to be headed toward significant improvement, so long as you can get your bare ass in bed in the next thirty seconds.

Before you can wriggle out of your briefs, you hear a groan from the bed, and freeze.

John immediately goes to the girls, leaving the bedroom door cracked enough to let a little bit of light in for you to see by. Rose is the closest to the edge of the mattress; you watch her writhe, listening to the little displeased mumbles falling out from pale, plump lips. You think you could use some Rose time pretty bad right now, actually.

John whispers a quick, ‘sorry,’ under his breath, leans in to kiss Rose. She dodges out from under his face, barely letting his lips graze her before she’s navigating around him—surprisingly nimbly for someone who just woke up.

“It’s fine,” Rose says, voice low and scratchy. “I had to use the restroom, anyway.” Her footfalls are heavier than usual, clumsier, as she pads, flat-footed, to the small ensuite bathroom.

The light flickers on. She doesn’t shut the door all the way.

… You really ought to brush your teeth.

“Hey, Rose,” you say, inching the door closed behind you.

There was a time, when you were thirteen and staring at coloured text on your computer screen, that the idea of communal bathroom time would strike you as faintly gross. You took all the privacy you could get in those days. Now, Rose only hums in acknowledgement before sliding her underwear down her thighs and plunking herself down. You rustle around in the mirror cabinet for your toothbrush and the glittery kids’ toothpaste that tastes like bubblegum.

You don’t talk because you have a mouthful of toothpaste. Rose doesn’t talk, presumably because she’s half asleep and trying to take a piss in peace. You try your best not to detract from that beautiful personal experience while you spit noisily into the sink.

You’re rinsing out your mouth when Rose finally hauls herself up, flushes (haha, she puts the seat down first, what the hell) and then levels you with a blank stare because you appear to be getting in the way of her washing her hands. She holds them away from her lavender nightgown, palms vertical, fingers wiggling passive aggressively in the background. You smirk at her through the mirror and take your time wiping leftover foam from the corners of your mouth before Rose hipchecks you out of the way and shoves her hands under the running water.

There’s no towel hanging where it should be, so you dig into the linen cabinet to find one while Rose lathers up her hands. You can’t believe she bothers with soap—you’re lucky if you rinse your hands for three seconds in cold water after taking a piss, but whatever. You wipe your face then go to hang up the towel. It never makes it to the rack because Rose plucks it neatly from you and proceeds to dry her hands, taking the time to thoroughly clean between each finger.

It seems the tiniest bit too meticulous for someone who is just supposed to be making a brief toilet run before going back to bed. You hover in front of the doorway, arms folded as you watch her.

...okay, she’s officially been drying her hands for about thirty seconds too long. What the hell.

“Lalonde?” you enquire, quirking an eyebrow at her above your shades.

The corners of Rose’s mouth tense up as she tucks the towel into the rack, then smooths it carefully. You stare at her blandly, then sigh, reaching up to nudge your shades off your face. You toss them behind the faucet. “Hey,” you say. “What’s up?”  
  
“You’re in my way, Strider,” Rose says, tone all cold and stuff like it gets when she tries to be clinically detached but has so many ulterior motives you couldn’t even fit them all into the back of Uncle Joe’s rusty old F-150.

You snort, not because it’s funny, but because you’re just _so tired_ and you want a fucking hug and Rose is the only person you can confide in right now. You’re basically a huge tit for putting all this pressure on her, but Jade and John can’t know and all your friends are dead and you don’t have any other _choice_. If you kept this—all this hot nasty mess—locked in your head, you’d fucking explode, no questions about it. It’d be a doucheshitting Stridesplosion all over the walls, and having to clean them would just remind Rose about all the time she has for housework now that she’s unemployed and out of school, and _that_ just won’t do. Making Rose’s life harder is not anywhere in your operating code, and if the squishy walnut inside your cranium crawled out your ear to go microwave itself, you’d probably have to quit your job, which would mean Rose’s life would, you guessed it! Become a whole lot more difficult than it already is.

So really, it’s hard for you _not_ to bug her with your shitbaby emotions, because at least her home therapy sessions are keeping you in enough sanity to continue stuffing rumpled dollar bills into her purse every weekend.

“Got somewhere to be?” you ask, relaxed enough that your voice twangs a little. You were getting good at suppressing your accent in the game, but living in Houston again makes it a whole lot worse. Sometimes, when times are good, John teases you about it. Fuckin’ Yankee.

“Funny you’d ask,” Rose says, running fingers through her loose, flyaway hair. Without the hairband the top likes to fluff up like a creampuff. You itch to smooth it down for her. “I seem to recall communal bedtime being three hours ago.”  
  
You scuff your bare foot on the tile. “Y’ know I was at work, Rosie,” you sulk, hunching your shoulders. This is totally unfair of her.

“Yes, of course,” she agrees, placid. “Which is why it’s past four in the morning, when some of us are trying to sleep.”

A small, angry part of you snaps back, _not like you have anything to do in the morning_ , but you rein it in. You probably would have blurted it out years ago but it’d be unnecessarily cruel and you don’t flip that waffle, thanks. That shit can burn. Get all crispy and carcinogenic and shit, like the miserable toxic taintcrust it is. No thanks, Hatred Waffle. Dave Strider isn’t even taking an inquisitive gander at that; turn to coal on your own time. Instead, you shrug. “Bus didn’t show. John had to come get me.”  
  
“Ah.”

She doesn’t say anything else, so you press on, “S’not my fault, I was all there sitting around like some underage prostitute waiting for daddy to come get her, like the Little Match Girl but with blowjobs instead of matches. Unfortunately even with these juicy, cock-sucking lips no one was buying, and I would have died of cold on the street corner if it weren’t for my hero in dorky blue socks coming to rescue my fine, frozen ass.”

Rose drops her eyes to your crotch—and, uh, these briefs really aren’t in the business of being subtle—and then looks back at your face.  
  
“Don’t worry, babe,” you say immediately. “My dick didn’t freeze off. It’s still hot and ready for you, just give me five bucks and I hope you enjoy the taste of waxy cheese and pizza sauce, just throw it in the microwave for two minutes and it’ll be just fine.” Her eyebrows form a dubious arch. You feel violently insecure pinched under her scrutiny, faced with not even the barest hint of amusement at your nervous blathering.

If only your instinct in these situations wasn't to just... babble more. Before you get the chance to vomit out more half-dead flow onto her adorable little bare toes, Rose says, “I have to go back to bed, Dave.”

You don't stop her, not anything close to forceful manhandling. You'd never put your hands on Rose like that. You just... fail to move.

The progression from dubious to irritated is tangible; you can see where Rose makes up her mind to get in your space, shoving her round, petite nose in your face and narrowing her eyes. “I believe I asked you to get out of my way.”

“No y'didn't.”

“It was implied.”

“Well, shoot,” you say, shrugging minutely. You glance down for a fraction of a second before jerking your gaze back up to fuse with hers, unwilling to show submission. “Guess I'm not good at picking that shit up. You know me, more literal than that android guy from Star Wars. I'm one loose funny bone short of forgetting how to use contractions.”

“Likely,” Rose deadpans, unwavering. God. Damn, she's—

She's...

You key in on a familiar smell.

Slowly, so she doesn't startle and eviscerate you like a twitchy cow, you reach your hand up to run through the pouf of blonde hair atop her head. It isn't as flawlessly soft as it usually is.

You know for a fact that you're the only person in this house who uses hair gel, and you have enough brand loyalty to know the scent of your shitty Bedhead rip-off. “Rose...” You rub a clump of stiff strands between your fingers, watching them come apart like the fraying of a rope. “Why are you wearing my hair gel?”

A gate slams down between you and her, one that always comes when she's determined to win a game she knows she's about to lose. You have enough experience to be fluent in Rose's body language. The years of her being the only human around, trying to read her through a smokescreen of intoxication... yeah, you know Rose. You almost cut her off before she speaks, but you change your mind, wanting to hear what she'll say.

“I went out today,” she claims, going for vague over a blatant lie. You know how to get around that.

“And you needed to do your hair?” you ask, playing the field. “I didn't know the president was in town. Are you cheating on us? Isn't that one of the signs—putting effort in where no effort was before? Dang, Lalonde, you do know how to make a girl feel abandoned. Unwanted, even. Where's my chocolate ice cream.”

Rolling her eyes, Rose turns on her heel and takes a step further into the bathroom, shifting like a caged animal. “Don't be ridiculous.”

“You first, kid,” you shrug. “You never care about your hair. What's different?”

Rose purses her lips together—you watch her face twist in the mirror, imagining how it correlates with her internal struggle. You aren't prepared when she opens her mouth and says plainly, “I had a job interview.”

Your pulse immediately switches to a hard hammer in your temple; your back straightens like an electric charge just chased up your spine. “What?”

Rose turns, looking calm but very much not, and levels you with a stare. “I had an interview this evening,” she repeats, the barest hint of a tremble in her voice.

“...and?” you breathe, lungs tight.

Her lips curl, a small gesture drenched in a wellspring of bitterness. Your heart lurches. “I wasn't what they were looking for.”

You swallow past a lump that somehow climbed into your throat and set up camp, eating lots of fried spam and getting good and fat somewhere within the last four seconds. “Gotcha.” She nods, meeting your gaze stubbornly. You break first, as usual, throwing your eyes over to a scratch on the paint of the linen closet. “Do you—”

“Not want to talk about it? Yes,” Rose says immediately, squaring her shoulders. “I just want to go to bed.”

“You didn't tell us,” you say.

“Ah, I see it's time for hypocrisy to rear its elegant head. Tell me, Dave, what did you tell John when he picked you up earlier?”

“That daddy didn't love me so he was kicking me out, and would he please let me be his cute little house slave in exchange for three squares a day like I ain't never had before.”

“Tonight seems to be doing well at showcasing your issues with your father figure,” Rose observes. “Disappointing that I find myself too tired to do anything about it. I believe you're off the hook for now.”

You scoff. “Daddy issues jokes, Rose? C'mon, we aren't thirteen anymore. You can do better than that.”

“Perhaps if I had some sleep,” she says, gesturing at the door.

Folding your arms across your bare chest, you lean back against it, lazily refusing her not-so-subtle hinting. “Not convinced.”

“I didn't want to get anyone's hopes up. There. Are you satisfied? Is that reasoning sufficient enough to inspire your release of my person?”

It's the same logic you used, all the way back at the beginning of this hellish downward spiral. You couldn't stand to see the disappointment in their faces, and you don't doubt Rose feels the same now. Doesn't make her lack of trust hurt any less, but it's fair. She probably felt this way when you lied to her first. Hahhh.

“If you need to talk about it—”

“ _No_ ,” she insists, jaw tightening. It's like wrestling with jammed cogs, watching them twist up in each other, edges grinding and tearing into a hopeless mess. You tug and tug but Rose is stubborn and wicked. You're an ant being dragged down into the eye of a whirlpool and every piece of driftwood you cling to is just being carted along with you.

You suck in a breath, and then another. “Shutting everyone out ain't gonna help,” you say, trying your best to be patient and calm.

Rose says 'fuck that,' and you can see her volume raising high enough to scrape paint off the ceiling before she even opens her mouth, and then it hits you in the face like a slap, her rebuke: “I am not shutting anyone out. Don't presume, it's unbecoming. All I've said, far too many times—although it seems to require an encore—is that tonight I want to go to sleep. That's all.”

You don't think about what you say, as per usual. “Please don't fucking do this to me right now.”

Her expression morphs into one of incredulous rage, narrow brows furrowing down into an angry blonde caterpillar draped dramatically over her eyes. You fear that caterpillar. You fear it a lot. “How are you making this about you? You think this is about you.” Not really a question—an accusation. Shit.

“I'm not makin' in about me,” you grumble, “It's just shitty, Rose. You aren't the only person in this house—”

“Would that I could be,” Rose interjects. You give her a kicked dog look, but she appears unfazed. The two of you face off for several long, uncomfortable moments, and then you turn away. You aren't letting her win—you aren't. You're just...

Well, you can't handle it right now, okay? She won't give you comfort and won't accept yours and you can't sit here shitting around with her until the sun rises because if you do you'll end up braining yourself on the toilet seat. You suck your teeth, then reach for your shades. You're done. “Ah,” says Rose, observing you placidly. “It's always a pleasure to be accused of putting up a wall by someone who does it habitually.”

“Fuck you, Rose.” You clutch the assemblage of wire and glass like a shield, fisting it close against your collarbones. If you could you'd have them glued to your skin, if you could you'd graft a veil over your eyes so you'd be permanently hidden and no one would be able to look ever again, not into your soul, like Rose does. They'd look and look and you'd stop them all.

“Let me out of the bathroom or I'll—”

“Yeah,” you say, cutting her off. “I don't need to hear your blackmail shit. Have a good fuckin' night, Lalonde.”

You say nothing, marching in just your briefs and shades into the bedroom and through the open door, squirming through the narrow opening John left. You hear his “hey, what?” behind you but keep walking anyway, focused on the fire hissing its way from your chest, up your throat. Bile hits the back of your mouth, bitter and stinging. You crashland on the den's couch, hissing at the blinking lights from all Jade's equipment.

The house is made of neat puzzle pieces. Kitchen, living room. Rose's domain. Tiny bedroom upstairs, main bathroom. Your area. The piano room, John's. The den, less cramped than usual after Jade's big purge. Of course there's the master bedroom, a mismatched blender of all your traits and interests, posters of wizards and webcomic characters on the wall, a pile of stuffed animals, both ironic and genuinely adored, balled up at the base of the futon. A knit scarf hanging off one of the hooks on the closet. A small handful of potted plants taking up space on the windowseat. The empty Con-Air box that somehow ended up on the floor in the linen closet that no one ever bothered to move.

Sometimes, it's too much. You can't go anywhere in this house without being able to _taste_ them, a synesthetic sensory assault that on a good day reminds you that you wouldn't be alone even if you wanted to be.

And then you want to be alone.

It's hard to find somewhere in this house where you can get away from them. You can't even go upstairs to your room because in the worst of these times, the person you want to be away from most is yourself.

Jade's humming machines make for a shit lullaby, but you curl up in the greasy-feeling blanket, shades still on, hoping for a few hours of restful sleep before the nightmares kick in. You build a protective cocoon, curling around your sensitive everything, hoping to lock the rest of the world out like even the biggest crowd of frothing monkeys, screaming and cursing you, couldn’t penetrate this wall. It'll be ruined by morning.

* * *

Two PM, when you finally drag yourself out of the den, you're a zombie. You need coffee. A lot of it.

You stumble up the short stairway, shuffling down the hall until you reach the turn into the kitchen. Eyes squinted most of the way closed, you hang left, slumping against the fridge like a sticky grub. You slide across the slick front, jarring magnets and papers, until you slam to a halt when you run into an— open drawer. Great. You groan into your palm.

“Good afternoon,” says a voice to your right. You reel back several inches, wincing visibly. It's too early; your mask hasn't had a chance to set yet. You emerge from your cocoon not as a beautiful butterfly, but a crumpled little turdy thing, plump and deformed. There are no wings for you to escape with, no God Tier powers blessing you from beyond the grave. (You get a headache when you use your powers, anyway. You try to avoid it at all opportunities.)

Abort mission, abort, abort.

“Uh-huh,” you grunt, and about face, slithering like the nasty abomination you are out of the kitchen and back to the bedroom. You get dressed as fast as possible, chucking on street clothes with a sigh of relief, happy to be wearing something that doesn't have a blinking sign plastered to your balls reading 'FUCK ME.' Throwing on a tired pair of sneakers, you bolt through the back door and jump the fence, taking off at a run.

You act like you're being followed all the way to the gas station, even though you know Rose didn't so much as twitch when you absconded from your kitchen encounter. There's no promise that she isn't following you with her mind.

There's no real way to get away from Rose's sight. You doubt she's even looking, though.

You're not sure which thought depresses you more.

Shouldering your way into the gas station, you buy a cup of shitty french vanilla cappuccino, then sit on the curb with your phone and slurp it down. You sigh heavily, not wanting to go back home, but your phone already reads '3:26' and you have stuff to do before you get to the club at nine thirty. The last thing you want right now is to go back there, but...

Bringing bacon, bread on the table, meat on the kids' bones, et cetera et cetera. You don't got a choice. It's been a while since you had anything like one.

Something warm and wet makes snuffling sounds at the back of your neck. You scream like a hysterical parrot and splash lukewarm coffee into your lap. “Shitzo, sorry about that, kid; mom's a little frisky!”

You engage in an intense mental debate on whether or not you should identify the voice first or freak out about the words, but as recognition hits you, you find that both things come at the same time. “Yaz?” you ask, brushing your pants off ineffectually as you shuffle around to face her. Instead of Yaz, you come face-to-face with a massive white dog, strapped into a red vest with more buckles and badges than you can count.

Up on the edge of the wall, Yazmin squints down at you through her thick glasses. “Destiny?” You watch her chin tilt, up, down, scanning you.

“I might be a little harder to recognize when my outfit doesn't show off every intimate detail of my package,” you say. “Take your time. Get a good look.”

Yaz lets out a high, shrieking giggle, and levers the weird, uh—you genuinely don't know what to call that thing—urging the dog forward. She bounces over the curb, hopping to the asphalt below. The dog steps down calmly, looking completely at ease with the situation. You guess it'd have to be one hella chill canine to deal with Yazmin's brand of manic energy. “Didn't know you had a dog,” you say, because suave has left the building and you look like you pissed yourself from some sort of kidney disease.

Grinning, she explains, “I'm not allowed to walk around alone, but my driver is only paid to take me to work and school. I give her my schedule ahead of time, so if I want to go to the store or visit a brothel, I have to get there by myself somehow.”

“Texas has brothels?” you ask, pinching your lips together to keep from smiling.

“Only if you know where to look!” Her wink is nearly lost behind the plastic rim of her glasses, but you catch it anyway. “So, what're you doing here?” she asks, tilting her head at you.

You shrug. “Just... chillin'.”

“Chillin',” she repeats.

“Yeah,” you say. “Like a—”

“Loser,” she finishes. “I feel you.”

“That's exactly what I was going to say,” you snort, nodding your head enthusiastically.

Yaz snickers, reaching down to scratch her dog's head. “Good, because you would be a terrible villain!”

“What? Nah, I'd be baller as fuck.”

“Totally lame.”

“Are you allowed to say that? Like, isn't that ablist. You fucking scum.” Fortunately Yaz gets the joke, which doesn't always happen when you make references to stupid internet bull, but she giggles away like the psychedelic hyena she is and slaps her thigh.

“Walk with me, Destiny,” she says, rolling her shoulder and readjusting her grip on her dog's harness.

“What'd you say that mutt's name was again?” you ask, peering curiously at the animal. You don't try to touch it, because well trained service dogs might be well behaved, but their training might involve violently mauling anyone who fucks with their charge, so you aren't going to take any chances. You're not going to get a headache rewinding the timeline to save yourself from being embarrassed in front of this hot, blind DJ.

“First,” Yaz says, staring straight ahead even as she talks to you, “Mom is purebred. None of your 'mutt' business, sir!” She trods over your muttered 'whatever,' continuing enthusiastically, “Second, her name is Pyralspite, but I just call her—”

“Mom?” you ask. When you get a nod in response, your only question is, “why?”

Reaching down to give the dog a good pat—she obediently halts the moment Yaz stops moving, reacting even faster than you do—she says, “Mom's taken care of me more than anyone else ever has. She's a total babe.”

“You're calling your canine maternal unit a babe?”

“Hell yes I am.”

"Well, aight."

Yaz drags you somewhere and you follow, content to be wheeled around as long as it'll distract you from your current house problems. She gets you to the park, establishes that you're both working tonight, and asks you if you'd like a ride. Despite of your impending chores, you seriously consider it. “I have to stop by my house to get my shit,” you say, unsure.

“That's fine,” Yaz says, flapping her hand. “My driver won't bitch too much!”

You groan. “She's gonna crash the car into my pool on purpose, I just know it.”

“That sounds fun! We should actually crash the car into the pool, Des.”

“It's a good thing I don't actually have a pool,” you deadpan, “because fuck the hell no.” Her laughter is so raspy and nice, more energetic than Rose's, more shrieky than Jade's. It's closest to John's, actually; his gets all high and pitchy when he's really laughing his ass off, unlike Jade's flighty tittering as it morphs into great belly laughs, unlike Rose's rolling timbre.

You compare it to your lovers' so you don't have to ruminate on how it sounds identical to Terezi's. Reincarnation's turning out to be a huge bitch.

The two of you shoot the shit, romping around the park. She lets her mom loose and flops around solo, eyes pinched to take in the world, huffing great huge breaths of air that she claims smell way better than seeing could ever feel. You're really glad she's happy. You're so genuinely fucking glad. Mom sniffs at a piss stain on a tree as Yazmin flops facefirst into the incline of a grassy hill. “I bet there's broken glass and used needles all over this fuckin' place,” you say, looking around. “You're gonna get syphilis.”

“I prefer Hepatitis C,” Yaz says, rolling onto her back and pulling off her glasses so she can grin emptily at the sky. You wonder what she's seeing, if not a discombobulated smear of colour and sensation. Watching the world through a tinted barrier, you think that must be nice. “Speaking of drugs,” says Yaz, rifling around in her pocket. She produces a skinny twist of thin paper. “Want a hit?”

You let out a sound of noncommittal agreement. You haven't smoked in a while. Maybe it'll give you a few scoops of Chill The Fuck Out and make it easier to face your family tonight when you stop by to pick up your work clothes. Yaz lights up and passes it to you, a dreamy smile already curling her lips.

Smoke threads its way into your lungs, hugging your circulatory system in big, wispy arms. It's a nice feeling after so long. Mitch cleared out half of his plants a while ago, so he hasn’t had any extra. You still don’t know what’s going on with him.

You’re not sure you care right now.

There’s only a couple puffs between the two of you before it’s gone, but it’s just enough to take the edge off. You’re left in a comfortable pile of warm goo, relaxed into the side of the hill as you wince at the bright Texas sky.

“So,” Yaz says eventually. “What’s eating you?”

You turn to frown at her, lips pursing together. “Whatcha mean?”  
  
“Aw, come on, kid,” she says, rolling her head to face you, expression amused. “You’ve been radiating so much discontent I can taste it, just being next to you is like drinking gasoline. I’d advise you not to light any matches, because fwoosh.”

“Fwoosh,” you repeat.  
  
“Yes. Fwoosh.”

“You just lit a match, like five minutes ago,” you remind her.

Yazmin shrugs. “My gasoline content was low. Now I’m fully saturated, so watch out, buddy.”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” you say, relaxing. Yazmin isn’t a Rose, even if she and Terezi were both seers. Yaz isn’t a seer, she’s just a legally blind stoner whose dog is trying to lick dried coffee off your crotch. You rub mom’s chin, but become aware after a few seconds that Yaz is still watching you. You wonder what you look like to her. You wonder if your edges are harder to see, or easier somehow. You wonder if it’ll be easy for her to take you apart, like it was for Terezi. “Last night sucked,” you tell her, voice hushed.

In the end, you’re still you. You don’t spill your guts. You aren’t going to, neither. But she says, “Work?” and you nod, scrubbing one knobby wrist joint under your nostrils. “Sucks,” she agrees. “I have a second job.”  
  
“Most of us do,” you nod.  
  
“It’s offensive,” she tells you.  
  
“I’m lyin’ to my housemates,” you say.

Yaz wrinkles her nose, thinks about it, and then gives you a sympathetic look. “They wouldn’t understand?”  
  
You let out a short, bitter chuckle. “Nailed it.”

“I’ll keep an eye out for you,” she says. “If I see any other jobs…”  
  
“Fat lot of good that’ll do, blind girl,” you say reflexively, so used to making fun of Terezi that you don’t think about how Yazmin might respond. You feel like an idiot immediately after, because they _aren’t_ the same person. No matter the similarities, they aren’t. “S’like a triple amputee all, if you need me just give me a call, I’ll come running,” you say, finishing the thought even though you’re regretting every word before the breath even leaves you.

There’s a pause in which you know you’ve fucked up. Yazmin clicks her tongue, and then says, “Depends on which three limbs.”

You guffaw, surprised and relieved. Yazmin grins back at you, then rolls onto her side. “You should tell your friends the truth.” Friends—whoops. Apparently she misinterpreted ‘housemates’… You’re pretty clear about being in a relationship but maybe she didn’t really understand that by ‘relationship’ you mean, well. It’s hard to figure out what to call Jade, John, and Rose. They’re everything undefinable, nothing you can quantify. You can’t say ‘girlfriends’ or anything gendered and ‘partners’ sounds so 90s closet gay, so you just paw around for whatever feels right to say at the time.

“Why?” you ask, not because you don’t know that honesty is important, but because you’re curious of her reasoning.

Yaz’s expression twitches into something noncommittal; she gives an awkward shift of her shoulders. “It’s going to eat you alive, keeping it secret.”

She’s not wrong. It hurts, the lying. It hurts, having no one left to rely on because everyone else has their own problems. It hurts, but not as much as rejection will. You don’t say that, though. “I’m into vore,” you say instead.

“What’s vore?” she asks.

“I’ll tell you when you’re older.”

“Joke’s on you. My gender identity is Peter Pan, and I’m never growing up.”

“Good,” you say, twisting to hold out your hand. “Give me all your weed. Kids don’t get to play with drugs.”

“Hey, what? Wait, no,” Yaz says, eyes going comically wide. “That’s not okay!”

“Sorry,” you say. “I don’t make the rules.” You take a deep inhale as Yaz pretends to die next to you, comfortably spacey.

“You simply cannot do this to me,” Yaz protests in the background of your awareness. “How am I going to lay down ill beats if I don’t see the music in my _cells_ , Des?” It reminds you of the fact that you have to go to the club tonight, and just like that anxiety snags you around the throat and holds on tight, shaking you just a little bit for emphasis. You have to go back there. _You have to go back there_. Shitfuck. “Whoa there, cowboy,” Yazmin says, a skinny elbow poking into your side. “Take it easy on those super harsh vibes you just started radiating!”

You grunt, “Can’t help it.” Fingers dance through your hair, and if it weren’t for the few months working at Prism you would have jumped. You’re not used to being touched by people you aren’t sleeping with, and everyone at the gay club is so _handsy_. Hugs and pats and swats and spanks and squishes and jabs and everything, invading your goddamn space like gnats flying through a screen door. Yaz pets your hair, and while it kind of feels nice at the same time you remain tense and ill at ease, deeply uncomfortable with life in general at this moment. You want to bury your face in Rose’s boobs right about now, but you two aren’t speaking and hiding in someone’s cleavage to escape responsibility is seriously immature.

… which is not to say that you could not hypothetically go home and bury your face in _Jade’s_ boobs. Hmmm. _Hmmmmmmm_.

You lift a hand, fully intending to pull out your phone and text Jade, all ‘hey can i go spelunking between yr magic space breasts dont ask why just say yes plz its an emergency,’ when Yaz intercepts you, seizing your wrist. “What,” you say.

“What?” she asks innocently, holding you in a vise grip while she fiddles with her other hand in her own pocket. Super rude. After a moment she comes up with something you can’t see, but you sure as fuck feel its pebbly smoothness when she presses it between your fingers. “Take this. Don’t spend it all in one place.”

You look at the tiny thing in your hand. “This is not money,” you say.

“I know,” Yaz says. “It’s drugs. I lied to you.”  
  
She is not lying about it being drugs. “What is it?” You really don’t have the experience with pills that Yazmin seems to have so you can’t guess what it is just by looking.

“Selegiline,” she answers. That doesn’t mean anything to you, but you nod anyway. “It’s an MAOI.” Yeah, you’re still lost. You just continue nodding, rolling the little pill between your fingers. Yaz watches you carefully for a minute, then snorts. “Just trust me. It’ll be really gentle with you, mostly make it easier to focus and socialize. I promise it’ll help you get through your shift tonight.”

You eventually snort, folding the offering in your hand. “I don’t want to know what this is actually used to treat, do I.”

“Probably not,” Yazmin snickers. “Are you going to take it?”  
  
“Are you going to tell me how much it cost you?”  
  
“Nope!” she answers, baring her teeth at you in a wide grin. Her dog swoops in, nosing messily at her cheek. Yazmin scritches the huge animal’s head, cooing at her. “Seriously, though! It’s a gift, say thank-you.”

“Thanks,” you answer automatically. You look back down at it, its dusty white surface, and flip it sideways between the pads of your fingers, staring at the curved edge. You say, “Should I take it now?” but Yaz shakes her head.

“Wait a little longer, take it half an hour before you start your shift.” You nod, again, taking her word for it. Fishing one hand into your pocket, you grab your wallet and, prying your wrist out of her grip, unzip the coin pouch and drop the tablet inside.

The two of you sit in silence for a while after you jam your wallet back into your pocket, you musing on the events of the day. It must be at least six by now, maybe later. You’ve kind of gotten lost in the surreally natural relaxation you feel while hanging out with Yaz. Usually it takes way the fuck longer for you to get comfortable around someone, but she just…

Well, the skinny is that it isn’t the first time you’ve hung around someone like Yaz. Mostly you’re just really, really glad. You don’t know how three reincarnations of your friends ended up in the same gay strip club in Houston, but you wouldn’t have been able to survive without them. They’re like trashy angels or something.

Grass itches the back of your neck, making you squirm. Mom has gone back to licking the coffee off your jeans. You don’t mind, patting her head even as she drools all over the denim. You’re changing these pants anyway. The big dog eventually gives up and prowls into the space between your and Yaz’s bodies, slumping down against her charge and closing her eyes, making soft doggy snuffles as she falls asleep. You scratch her fur underneath the service vest and give Yazmin a caged look. She’s peering fondly at her pet, with an arm thrown around her back squishing the dog’s head against her chest. You think about smiling, but don’t. “Hey, Yaz?”  
  
“Mm?” Her eyes flicker to you, even though it doesn’t really matter. It’s polite, anyway, you suppose.

“Why are you so nice to me? Like, you barely know me.” You don’t expect the question to come out the way it does. It sounds timid and shy the way you say it, so uncharacteristically sincere and vulnerable. You really mean to be more sarcastic about it, kind of blow it off like you don’t care, but the way it sounds like just asking involved gutting yourself hari-kari style, to present your squishy internal organs to her for inspection, well. It’s obvious that you do.

Yazmin gives you a soft, sad smile. She takes your hand, even though you tense immediately and try to pull away. She’s strong. She doesn’t let go. Her fingers lace with yours; she draws your hand through mom’s fur, over her expanding and relaxing ribcage, to Yazmin's mouth, where she proceeds to ghost a kiss over your knuckles. “Oh, kid,” she whispers. “Because we were lovers in a past life.”

“Your eyes ain’t green,” you say automatically. “And Kesha’s done better.”

She has to be fucking with you. There’s no way, absolutely no fucking way. So why can’t you breathe?  
  
Those pretty matte brown lips peel apart into a broad grin. “Ahaha, silly Dave. You have terrible taste in music.”

You’re pretty sure you didn’t tell her your real name. You’re pretty sure that, unless she’s a psychotic stalker, there’s no way she should be able to know it. It’s not like your ID was visible when you pulled out your wallet. “Bullshit,” you breathe. “I am a master of all things indie cred. It’s not my fault Kesha’s literally made of glitter and raw, delirious brilliance.” She still hasn’t let go of your hand. Her eyes are dreamy. Ohhhhfuck, maybe you should have been a little more clear about that whole roommate situation. “Yaz,” you say nervously. “You know I’m—”  
  
“Omg,” she says. No, really, she literally says ‘omg,’ like as a word. You’re simultaneously disgusted and impressed. “Don’t give me that look, kid. I know you’re spoken for. I’m just saying.”

For a long time you don’t know what to say. It’s too much to process. You didn’t even know if you were right about reincarnations, it was just a happy guess, but now… “What do you remember?”  
  
“Nothing, really,” Yazmin says, shrugging. “Just that… I knew you.”

“Biblically,” you agree.

She snerks. “Yes, that too.”

“Do you remember what my dick looks like?”

“Nope,” she answers cheerfully, “And unless you wish to rectify that, we’re changing the subject!” You let a small grin slip as you bob your head in agreement, tucking your free hand behind your head. It’s ill timed, because Yazmin abruptly stands up, tugging your hand to bring you along with her. You follow reluctantly.

Your voice is almost grumpy when you ask, “What’s up?” You were enjoying laying there.

“Come on,” Yaz says, nudging her awakening dog so she can get a grip on her harness. “We’re going back to your place.”  
  
“We are?”  
  
“Yessir,” she answers, teeth gleaming as she beams at you. “I’m going to ask your harem for permission to take you out to dinner, and then after that, mister, you’ve got work to do.”

You really did have chores around the house—laundry, dishes, other shit. But you nod, anyway. “Uh-huh.” Then you think about it and wince, protesting, “Hey, I uh, actually can't really afford—”

“Kid,” Yaz laughs, “My treat. I absolutely cannot believe you would think I’d take you out without paying! What am I, some sort of charlatan?”

Jamming your hands in your pockets, you look down at your slimy, coffee-covered jeans. “I'm gonna have to change my pants,” you say, sucking your teeth in contemplation.

“Probably,” Yaz agrees. “You can do that while I'm sweet talking your harem.”

“It's more Rose's harem, really,” you say.

“Who's Rose?”

“Just some flighty broad. No one important.”

She laughs. “When I meet her, I'm telling her you said that!”

“Go ahead,” you say. “I'm already in the doghouse. Can't get any worse.”

* * *

You come soaring in the front door, feet barely touching the ground. Your wrist is sore from holding your bag, stuffed with the usual fare but also some Vietnamese leftovers, both yours and Yazmin’s because she forced you to take it all. You’re pretty sure walls are just a suggestion right now and forget about the floor, you’re fucking floating, because you are high as _shit_.

It’s not a euphoric high, is the thing. You’re just genuinely happy.

Whatever was in that white little pill was exactly the magic you needed to confidence the fuck out of this scene, raking up over one hundred dollars in shot sales alone, plus tips, plus a couple hundred more from your dances. You got a _fifty_. You got so much rain that Nova had to scamper onstage at the end of your set to help you collect it all. Usually that shit only happens to the veteran queens and, well, Nova himself.

But it happened to you. It happened to _you_ , and you are fucking elated and nothing could be better than this moment—nothing except for having someone to share it with, except it’s three AM and your family is probably asleep, which is okay. It’s so okay, because you can just squiggle right into bed between them and cling to every body part you can find, metamorphize four more arms and turn into SpiderDave, grab onto each of them and never let go, just stay buried in a pile of your favourite people until you suffocate and go wherever it is that stoned people go when they die during the best trip of their life.

Yeah. You’re going to do _exactly that_.

You don’t feel your bag fall to the floor, don’t hear it hit the ground with a thump. Don’t worry if you’re getting Vietnamese rice all over your sexy clothes, don’t think about it, don’t care, you fly through the living room and the dark kitchen and you lose your shoes somewhere along the way, and then you’re in the hallway and there’s a big lump there, and you fucking love the shit out of that big lump so you surge in and wrap your arms around it, pressing your face between a pair of shoulderblades.

The big lump turns out to be John, from the lack of amazing squishy breasts, from the height, from the hardness in his arms and chest and his belly. You flatten your palms against his front and just touch, because wow, John feels so pretty.

“Whoa,” says John, voice all rumbly and rough, voice like bourbon going down the wrong tube, voice like he’s half asleep and warm and perfect. “Welcome home, bro.”  
  
“Mmf,” you go into his spine. The ridges imprint into your cheek and you hope they mark you forever, leaving grotesque craters in your face and temple, like you turned into a ball of playdough and got dropped into park gravel by a clumsy child. You are the clumsy child, pawing at John’s solid chest, letting one hand droop to find the seam between sleepshirt and sweat pants— _ah_ , got it, worming in to hot sculpted belly, the dip of a navel, gentle slopes of abdominals, you want to taste every crease in his body. You want to plant strawberries in the furrowed field of his muscled flesh and then eat them without using your hands. “You’re fuckin’... great,” you mumble against the fabric of his shirt. “So great.”  
  
“Haha, are you drunk?” John asks, settling back into you, and _yes good_.

You don’t answer because you’re letting your shades go somewhere, melting into the ether until you just have your face and the pieces of John’s back, fit together so nicely, you like them so much. His skin is sleep-burnt, so toasty and satisfying against your outside night chill. God, yes. “God yes,” you breathe out, not intending it to be a response, you’re just drowning in how amazing he feels.

Hipbones strong and protruding against your palm, you follow their hollows, one and then the other, stroking the extent of his pelvic girdle. He isn’t even a little hard but you are, when did that happen? Pressed against his ass (squishier than yours, squishiest part of him, haha, he had baby fat for so long and then one day it just dripped off and you were left all like, god _damn_ ) you roll and then twitch and roll again, like a shuddery wave. Your mouth presses into soft t-shirt material, breathing into passionfruit laundry soap because Rose likes the smell, hoping desperately that your breath is acid and you can just sear a hole straight through and then worm your way inside him like a parasite, through bone and a hallway of tendons, into marrow and organs, fuck, you love him.

John laughs, slumps easily against the wall, which, when did that get there? You don’t care, you love him, you want him. Nose trailing up until you find bare skin, seeking like a bloodhound, you lick up his neck until you go too far and taste hair, and he giggles and squirms and you _pluh_ and chuckle back deliriously, grip loosening enough that he can turn in your arms to face you. Dark shadows compose the angles of his face, stately but still rounded, like Jade if she were more marshmallowy. Umber skin and piercing blue eyes that reach through the darkness of the hallway to grab at your optical nerves, riveting you.

You kiss him, then, heated and wet. Your tongue is heavy and clumsy in your mouth but you lick at him desperately, hungry for his taste. In real life John doesn’t taste like anything but spit and gushers, but under a delirious haze it’s metallic and robust, morning breath with a hint of hours-old mouthwash. You could eat his fucking cavities, you swear.

Big bear paws cup your cheeks, holding you as John kisses back through his snickers. He’s laughing at you, and it’s so great. You’re hilarious. You can always make John laugh. Lately he doesn’t laugh enough, not at you, not at anything. He laughs now and you drink it down, tonguing the back of his teeth like you could draw more of the sound out of his mouth. “Mngh,” you say, and it was supposed to be words but your mouth is too busy being full of John’s tongue, so words can call back later. Much later.

Body levering, you roll until his back is against the wall (yes, good wall, thanks for always being there to support you, or your hot boyfriend, that’s just really great of this wall to do) and press your hips into his, ignoring his softness, ignoring everything but coarse black hair tickling your palms and your bottom lip fitting perfectly between the crease of his.

John’s kisses grow smaller, soft pecks against your mouth, the space between you growing after each one. That isn’t okay, that’s not good. You crash back in, fisting his hair, gasping desperately against his mouth. You’re so needy you’re gagging for him, hips stuttering against his thigh. “Shit, John,” you whine.

His hands drop to your shoulders, tighten. You don’t budge despite the small amount of pressure he applies, but that’s stupid, it’s wrong, why would he want to be away from you? “Haha, Dave, come on,” he says. “You’re really drunk.”  
  
“Not drunk,” you protest, “‘m so fuckin’, uh, sober, like the soberest. I barely drank like, even one shot, just, a little somethin’, on the side, you’re so hot, John, I think my shades melted off I don’t know where I put them please fuck me, please.”

Snorting, John slides his hands down your arms, yes, grabs your hands, pulls them away from him, _no_. “I don’t think you’re up for that right now!” he says, before adding, “and neither am I. Let’s just go to bed and we can talk in the morning. Do you need any water or aspirin or anything?”

Your voice cracks as you use his grip on you to pull his hands to your body, pressing them against your worn raglan. “Need you,” you vocalize; it’s barely speech, slurred and messy and rushed. “Need you so much, c’mon.” You’re slippery, you slip past him, morphing through his hands until your bodies form a hot line, mouth coming to his chin, teeth clamping down a little harder than you intended—you just wanted to taste him, damn it.

“Ow! Fuck, Dave!”  
  
“Sorry,” you mumble, trying to pet at him. You nuzzle your forehead against his chin deliriously. “Sorry, sorry, just please, I need you.” You wrangle a hand free, cup it behind his neck as you dart in for another kiss, canting your lower body forward, maybe you can spur some life into him if he just _feels_ how hot you are for him.

“I said no,” John says quietly, turning his head away from you, brow wrinkled. Your nose bumps his cheek with a petulant groan from you. You try to tug him around back facing you, practically hump his thigh, before John says, expression oddly hurt and all his pretty features crumpled into an ugly mask: “Dave, _fuck off_.” He gives you a light shove with his elbow but you’re holding on, you’re not letting go, you’re—

Flying through the air, oh god everything is black and you’re dying, your stomach just tore itself out of your body and got left behind in a puddle on John’s feet and your least favourite wall slams into your back—it’s your least favourite because fuck, that _hurt_ , did he throw you, what? _What?_

Then there’s green eyes and a furious snarl in your face, no fuzzy dog ears, those are gone, but Jade is still all but growling at you, forearm jammed into your throat and fist in your shirt. “I don’t know what the fuck you think you’re doing, but it’s going to stop _right now._ ”

Your eyes are wide with surprise, misunderstanding. “Jade, that fuckin’ hurt,” you say. You’re in shock.

“You deserved it! Did you even realize that you were trying to force yourself on John?!”

What? What, no. No! Your mouth flaps uselessly, open, closed. You gawp at her in horror. “N-no,” you stammer, “I was just—”

“Not listening when he said no? Because _that’s_ what you were doing, Dave!”

“No,” you say again, pupils blown huge. “I didn’t. J— John?” You look beyond her, at where John is still hovering on the other end of the narrow hallway. You didn’t realize it was so skinny before. You didn’t realize how scared and hurt John could look before now. No. _No_.  
  
“Look at me,” Jade orders, giving you a good, hard shake. “Look at me right now and take responsibility for being so fucked up, dumbass!”

“I’m sorry?” you guess, mostly terrified.

Jade gives you another firm shake. “Not good enough! Tell him,” she instructs, piloting you around to face John, “Not me.”

You stare at him, raw and empty. “John?” you ask, voice impossibly small. You didn’t. You couldn’t. You just wanted… Oh god, shitfuck. You wanted him and he said no and you tried to convince him otherwise. You didn’t even— How did you even get here?  
  
Time turns into sludge around you. The disappointed look on John’s face is frozen, permanent, and you put it there. You perceive every twitch of fingers, ever inhale, each in separate frames, each one lasting minutes, hours. What did you do, what did you do? You can’t think, can’t remember— But no, you remember, every moment you remember, then Jade. Jade? “Jade?” you ask, giving her an unhinged look. The word comes out stupid and slow.

John isn’t saying anything. Jade looks angry, angry that you called for her instead of him. Angry at you. Angry that you touched John without permission.

You drip down the wall, land in a gross heap.  
  
“Don’t think you’re going to make me feel bad for you,” Jade says.

“Jade,” someone says, someone not you. Someone calm, collected, a bit afraid, sister-lover-friend, Rose, Rose, you turn toward her: haggard, desperate, searching. “I don’t know if it’s escaped your notice,” Rose says, “But Dave is extremely inebriated. It’s likely he has no idea how to process what’s happening around him right now. While his behaviour is of course inexcusable, I suggest you give him a few hours to regain coherence before—”

“Fuck that!” Jade snaps. “I don’t care if he’s drunk, or high, or whatever! He’s being the biggest assbutt right now, and he’s going to say sorry.”

Rose meets your gaze calmly, but you don’t think there’s sympathy there. Regret, maybe. Disappointment, she’s so disappointed. You’re all disappointed. Where did you go wrong? Tonight was almost so good. “I don’t think you fully understand the situation,” Rose begins.

Your partner, your friend, your Jade rounds on her, ectosibling-blood-life Rose, snarling like the animal she was in another life. You can see the echoes of grey on her skin, from when she joined Rose in the empty space behind the veil of sanity. They both are so dark inside, broken and sad. You’re all so broken and sad, and you made it worse, when all you were trying to do was make it better. You’re each severed piano string, snapping inside your ribcage with discordant howls of pain and so, so much regret.

If only you’d have closed that window.

Jade reels into Rose’s face, teeth bared, “You think I’m stupid, don’t you?” she asks, demands; yells. John looks on with uncertainty, out of his depth. You shook him up. It’s all your fault. “You think,” Jade continues, “That I don’t know when something’s going on?”  
  
“I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about—”  
  
“Bullshit, Rose! Bull _shit_. You’re keeping secrets, both of you!” Rose closes her mouth. Jade froths, throwing her glare between the both of you. “That’s not how this is supposed to _work_ , you absolute walnuts!”

“Jade,” says John. Everyone’s attention slips back to him, like raindrops collecting in a gutter. He looks trapped, but swallows, squaring his shoulders. You wish he’d just scream or cry or keep looking scared. He shouldn’t have to be strong right now. He shouldn’t have to be responsible for this. “I don’t think this is the best place to, um.” He doesn’t trail off, but just. Stops.

Contemplative silence fills the hall, and then Jade announces, “Everyone has thirty seconds to get into the living room. Hop to!”

“Um, Jade?” says John. You think if anyone throws her off one more time she’s going to make the house implode. “I have to go to the bathroom.”  
  
She balls her fists up at her eyes. “Ugh! Can’t you wait?”

John whines, “Jaaaade. No, I can’t!”  
  
“Bluh!” she exclaims. Then she folds her arms over her chest. “Fine. You have _two minutes_ , mister. Everyone else, living room. Now. No more excuses!”

There’s one problem with that, and that is that you can’t move, your limbs are awful and jellied and you’re shaking. Jade gives you a glare that says she doesn’t give a fuck, so Rose tucks you under her arm and pulls you to your feet, coaxing you down the hall. Each step throws you into horrible vertigo—maybe you shouldn’t have had that shot, were you even supposed to drink with that pill? Serelligine-a-whatever? You can’t even remember the name.

If you weren’t so disoriented you’d speed up time so you didn’t have to endure the whole process of moving into the living room, but eventually Rose is lowering you onto the couch and you’re sinking into the worn cushions, utterly exhausted. “You are _not_ going to fall asleep,” Jade announces, jabbing a finger in your face.

“No ma’am,” you slur obediently, eyelashes fluttering. Where the fuck did you put your shades? Damn it.

Rose sits next to you, folding her hands in her lap. You want to curl up between her thighs and cry into her soft stomach, mess it up with your snot and tears and fall asleep covered in goop as she pets your hair. She doesn’t look at you, though. You swallow heavily.

Jade sits on the chair across the narrow living room, shoving some of Rose’s knitting off carelessly. She crosses her legs and just. Stares. Her face is a lined frown, twenty years aged, dark and unforgiving. You ache for someone to talk, for the yelling to start again, for John to come back. For the moment Jade just levels you with her judgment and you start getting panicky just sitting there waiting for something to happen.

Eventually John shuffles back in, lead-footed and slow. You watch him as he examines the seating options, and then ends up choosing a corner of floor exactly ninety degrees between Jade and the couch. He looks at you, and you hide your gaze in your lap, face burning.

“Now that we’re all here,” Jade says, leveling you and Rose with a fierce look, “I want to know exactly what the hell is going on. Who wants to go first?”

“I will,” says Rose, and then, “Dave,” says Rose, and no, why, you thought she was going to talk about the situation, why is she calling you out too? Not that you don’t deserve it, shit. “Why are you coming home drunk?”  
  
“Not drunk,” you say. “Yaz gave me somethin’,” you say, hating yourself as you do. “To make work easier.”

“There’s one mystery solved,” Rose says flatly.

Jade sighs, “Damn it, Dave!”

She doesn’t seem to latch onto it as fast, but John’s spine straightens and he looks straight at you and says, “Why is work so bad that you have to come home like this?”  
  
Rose snorts delicately. “Why, indeed.” You give her the most vicious look possible, which is probably not all that vicious because your face is mostly blank and just a little bit wild on the edges. You probably just look like you’re about to puke, which is not too far from the truth.

Jade zeroes in on that, narrowing her eyes. “I don’t think Rose needs to ask why! I am pretty sure all those secret conversations you’ve been having that you don’t think John and I have noticed are related to this whole mess, so don’t you even try fucking with me.”

There is a tense pause, and then Rose dips her head. “Noted.”

“Stop stalling,” Jade snaps. “I am going to get answers.” She turns to you. “Dave.” No, please. Go back to Rose. Uerugh. “I’m going to give you exactly one chance to tell me the truth, and then I’m going to— arrrgh! I don’t know what I’m going to do, but you’re not going to like it, so just tell me what’s going on, you stupid dick parade!”

“Um,” you say.

Off to the side, John explodes into uncomfortable, hysterical laughter. “ _Dick parade_ ,” he repeats. “Oh my god, Jade.”

She pouts at him. “Don’t make fun of me! I’m being serious right now.”  
  
“Seriously dumb,” John says.

“Excuse you! I’m defending your honour, you ungrateful ass.”  
  
“I’m grateful,” he snickers, wiping at his eyes. You’re pretty sure he almost cried there. You slump further into the cushions, hoping the couch will swallow you like two-day-old spunk queefed out into someone’s unexpecting mouth. He slowly picks himself up off the floor, brushing his sweatpants off. “Look, I think we need a liiiiittle change of pace.” He drags his feet over until he’s standing in front of you, looking oddly benevolent. “Dave,” he says, even as you shrink back from him. “That was really fucked up.”

Your jaw works wordlessly, but eventually you force out a strangled, “I know.”  
  
“And it’s really fucked up that you came home like this, dude. Doing drugs is one thing, but getting to the point where you aren’t in control, that’s really dangerous!”  
  
You nod. “I know.” Your throat feels so, so tight.

“And… I know you wouldn’t have really, like…” his throat convulses, adam’s apple bobbing. “You wouldn’t have, you know, forced it, but that you tried even a little is, it’s super not okay, Dave.” His voice drops to a low hush. This is so fucking unfair to him and you can’t believe it’s happening.

“I know,” you say, choking on the words. “I know, John, and— fuck, I’m sorry. Fucking, I’m so so sorry, I didn’t even think, wow, that’s so fucking dangerous, right? I didn’t think and I hurt you, I almost _raped_ you—” You say it and feel the flinch that runs through the entire room. You can’t believe you actually said it, when John couldn’t, but your inhibitions are fucked and as soon as it occurred to you you weren’t able to keep the thought inside.

“Shh, Dave,” John says, projecting both fear and vehement discomfort. “I get it. You don’t have to—”  
  
“Yes, yes I do. I deserve way fucking worse than this, like I am the prolapse cherry on top of the shit cake, I’m a fucking liar and a fuck-up and a terrible boyfriend. You don’t even _like_ sex, and I thought I could just magically fucking fix that, like waving my dick-wand and imbuing you with the desire to get your schlong wet, when we all know it doesn’t work like that, I’m just, I can’t even think, it was so good and now it’s not, I’m really, I’m really fucking _sorry_ , John.” And then you’re gagging on a cough, hacking into your hand as hot tears spill out from the corners of your eyes.

This warm body swoops in and wraps around you, strong arms encircling your shoulders and pulling you into this wonderfully solid chest. John’s hugging you, cradling you, rocking you. You bury your face into his neck and let out a disgustingly loud wail, torched with frustration and regret and agony. John bounces you in his arms like a child, voice making little hush-hush noises.

There’s no telling how long you spend making a mess of his shoulder, sobbing out your pent-up bullshit. John shouldn’t have to comfort you through this—you don’t _deserve_ it. He would be fully entitled to be mad at you forever after what you did, and yet here he is.

“Look,” John says, but you’re not sure if he’s speaking to you. “I don’t think Dave can handle this right now.”  
  
“Um,” protests Jade, “since when was this about _Dave’s_ feelings?”  
  
“It’s not,” John continues, voice even. “It is about mine, and _I_ don’t like seeing Dave like this. I don’t think we can have this conversation tonight because Dave is _seriously_ fucked up and I think it would just be best if we let him sleep and deal with this in the morning, okay?”

Jade probably looks very reluctant. You don’t know, because you’re still snuffling into John’s shoulder and clinging to him like a monkey with its hand in a jar, clinging to a banana he just can’t manage to extract. You will die with your hand in that fucking banana trap if it means you don’t have to let go of John. He’d be right if he wanted to break up with you, and then where would you be? Where would _any_ of you be? Without one of them — you can’t even think about it. If it isn’t all of you it doesn’t work, and you almost compromised that.

You let forth a new sob into his shoulder, and John rubs your back firmly. “Listen to that. That is so ridiculously pathetic, I’m going to have nightmares about how sad this is.”

“Fuck you,” you mumble. A snot bubble forms from your left nostril, then pops when you sniffle. Fucking beauty, that.

“I think that is what got us into this mess in the first place,” John says, not unkindly.

You snort, and then you laugh, lifting a hand to scrub at your face. “Fuck. I’m so fucking sorry.”

“I heard you the first ten times,” John snorts, and then he hauls you to your feet. Unprepared, you sway dangerously, stomach turning. “Oh, shit!” he gasps. “Sorry, I forgot you were—”  
  
“S’fine, s’fine,” you moan, trying to steady yourself. “I won’t puke on your feet. Probably.”

“Eww,” says John.

Beside you, Rose stands, although she does it with much more grace than either of you. “I believe John is correct; Dave needs sleep.”  
  
Jade looks reluctant, arms fold over her chest defensively. Rose levels her with a calm stare, and then she drops her hands, flailing them in irritation. “Fine! But I’m getting you all up early,” she promises, shaking a finger threateningly. “You aren’t getting out of this, don’t even think that I’ll forget about this.”  
  
“Wouldn’t dreamuvit, babe,” you say as John and Rose spread your lax meat out between them. Jade sighs one final time, then walks forward to help them get you to the bedroom. You’re surprised they don’t make you sleep outside on the porch, or at least in the den, but it’s definitely your shared futon they drag you to, settling you down on its soft surface. They undress you, though not sexily, and throw a fresh pair of boxers at you. You don’t bother slipping into them, brushing them off your knee before you flop backwards into the covers.

They fill in the space around you, murmuring soft things between them. The atmosphere is far from relaxed, but it isn’t the worst it could be. Jade’s wedged in the corner, stewing, and Rose is at the end with her back to you, but John holds you and pets your face, spooned against your side.  
  
“I don’t deserve this,” you tell him.

“No, you do not,” John agrees. “But I’m kind of an adult, and I can make the decision to do this anyway.” He smiles at you through the darkness, wavery but there.  
  
“You know I didn’t mean it, right? I never would have— If I had only stopped to think—”  
  
“Shh,” says John. “Only sleep now. I get it, Dave. Promise.”

You flutter a chaste kiss against his fingers, then close your eyes. You’re pumped full of adrenaline and Yaz warned you that the Siliegline-stuff might make it hard to sleep. You didn’t expect it to be a problem but now that the drama has settled down you’re ridiculously wired, staring at the empty ceiling even as John’s breathing evens out next to you.

It’s been a few hours and you’re coming down, fortunately. You don’t know when you’ll be able to relax enough to sleep.

Instead, you think about all the ways you’ve fucked up. You think about how things could have been different, how you could have gone about the situation in a way that would have saved everyone this pain.

You think about how you could just rewind the timeline so none of this happened.  
  
“Don’t you dare,” comes a voice at your side.  
  
“What?” you whisper back.  
  
“Don’t you dare,” Rose hisses, looking over her shoulder at you with a hard expression. “If you do that, I won’t forgive you. You don’t deserve freedom from these consequences.”  
  
You shrug, careful not to wake up John. “Neither do you.”  
  
“Exactly,” she says.

You meet her eyes through the dark, and nod. You both deserve what’s coming. No more hiding; no more secrets. It’s time. You’re about to get assfucked with honesty and your tears are going to be the only lube you get. You can only hope your family is still intact by tomorrow afternoon. “Sweet dreams, Rose.”

It’s going to be a long night.


	3. three

You honestly don’t mind being woken up by a pillow to the face. It’s better than the time you promised Jade you’d clean up your shit before the morning but totally forgot, causing her to express displeasure by literally sitting on your head. No, a pillow is pretty generous, which given your drug hangover, you appreciate. Where insult is added to injury is that it’s one of the grody spare pillows that no one actually uses; the one you always kick off the den couch before sleeping on it.

You wake up to intimate skin contact with oily fabric bludgeoning repeatedly into your cranial area. Groaning, you roll over, burying yourself in the comforter to hide. Huh. There’s no one else in the bed that you can feel. How did they all leave without waking you up? You’re far from the heaviest sleeper in the gang—probably the lightest, actually, because of Bro’s mischief and suchnot, had to be on your toes—

Jade puts a stop to your dazed musings with a foot to your ass, and _ow_ , that’s gonna bruise something good. Hopefully it falls under the strap of your underwear because you have work tonight and—

Oh.

Right.

Coming to is not enjoyable, but it certainly happens. You mumble something that’s meant to appease your fierce Amazonian girlfriend’s unholy rage and flop back over, eyes burning and body sore. Your mouth tastes like you were gargling horse semen and forgot to rinse. “I’m up, fuck,” you mumble, catching Jade’s foot just as she draws back for another strike.

“Rose said if you weren’t up by ten I got to make you.” Her eyes are hard.

“Wouldn’t have it any other way, gorgeous,” you say, releasing her foot. “Lemme brush my teeth, or have I lost those privileges too?”

Jade seems to think about it, but eventually gives a swift nod and moves out of your way. You shuffle, dragging your heels all the way to the bathroom, only stopping to grab the boxers you abandoned the night before. Someone has laid out sweatpants and a tank top for you (probably Rose). You clean yourself as much as possible before pulling the clothes over your shameful flesh, grimly preparing for your bloody, painful demise.

You stare at yourself in the mirror and mouth ‘fuck.’ How the hell are you going to tell them?

Maybe it would have been okay if you’d said something at the start. You probably should have like, _asked permission_ or whatever, considering you’re in a committed relationship and sex work isn’t exactly the most family friendly profession. You don’t remember now your exact justification for not telling them, or how you managed to convince Rose to go along with it. It’s been long enough that you just took the privacy for granted… and now it’s come to bite you in the ass.

You start to freak out a little. This is probably a break-up-worthy offense. If assaulting John in a drug-altered haze didn’t do it (which there’s still no guarantee it won’t yet, you remind yourself) then its connection to the self-abusive habits you began picking up to cope with your line of work might just be the straw that breaks the camel’s back.

Or, in this case, the straw that shatters your family unit into dysfunctional, lonely pieces.

Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck. How did you manage to screw up this badly?

The face in the mirror is blank, as it always is, when your eye starts twitching. You’re tense like a piano wire tuned too tight (that damned piano; that’s why you got into this situation in the fucking first place) but you won’t let yourself crack again. You don’t cry, you can’t, but your fingers dig painfully into the lime-stained porcelain sink and a tiny dribble of blood inches its way down from one of your nostrils. Staring at the red against your pale, freckled skin, you remember the first time you were confronted with your own blood—not your own, but dead-you, castoff-you, a forgotten link in the neverending chain of disposable Daves, crimson on your hands and under your fingernails, dripping toward your upper lip and your vision is blinking in and out your eye is throbbing so hard, you might actually faint. Maybe you’ll fall and bash your head against the side of the toilet and die and you won’t have to deal with losing your family, won’t have to live with yourself knowing you ruined the most important thing you ever had, won’t have to—

“Dave.”

You spin. Fortunately Rose has fast reflexes, and catches you before you actually brain yourself on the edge of the sink.  “We’re waiting, Dave,” she says evenly, steadying you.

You give her a panicked look. “Rose—”

She places a finger over your lips. “No. No more private confidence. What you want to say, you need to say to all of us.” Pause. “To them.” Rose gives you a plaintive look and you understand; fuck, you’re the worst person in the world for putting her in this position in the first place.

Shittiest Boyfriend of the Year and also Forever, that’s you.

She doesn’t let you go out alone, and for that you’re grateful. The two of you walk out hand in hand, solemn faced as you enter the living room where Jade and John are already seated, side-by-side and sipping coffee, looking as apprehensive as you feel. “Hey,” you croak. Their eyes are on you, on your hand linked with Rose’s (incriminating her, you realize; you should have taken all the blame but here she is anyway), on the bags under your bare eyes. You have no idea where your shades went.

“Sit down,” Jade says icily.

John frowns at her. “Jade, come on.”

“John, no,” she responds, frowning back.

“This isn’t an interrogation.”

“Like hell it isn’t!” she exclaims, slamming her mug down on the coffee table. “Damn it, there’s been enough secrets going on around here—I want _answers_.”

“And answers you’ll get,” Rose says calmly, elbowing you further into the room, until you’re standing alone in front of John and Jade. She folds her hands in front of her stomach and goes to perch lightly on the arm of the couch, still a fair distance from the other two.

Here it is. Moment of truth, you think. The last few minutes of your family being in love and intact. You’d take your time landing the blow, but you think the longer you wait the more pissed Jade’s gonna be, so you don’t try and prolong it. You’ve gotten away with enough as it is. “I haven’t been honest with y’all both,” you say.

Jade snorts. John shushes her, watching you with earnest blue eyes. It breaks your heart.

“The truth is that I've been working something I never thought I'd do, because I didn't think I had a choice in the matter seein' as we were so desperate, and that kinda got me fucked up so I—”

“Oh my God, Dave,” Jade interrupts, her eyes suddenly blown wide and horrified. She's sitting on the edge of her seat, hands fisted in her skirt, coffee cup abandoned on the table surrounded by dark splashes. “Are you _selling yourself_?”

You almost choke. “Not exactly,” you say, casting your eyes over to where Rose has her hand over her mouth in a mixture of horror and amusement.  

“Not exactly...?” John repeats, his brow furrowing. “Dave, then what—”

“I'm a stripper,” you blurt out, and the room descends into silence.

Correction: the room plummets violently into the most tense and uncomfortable absence of noise you've ever experienced, including during the time you spent hurtling through the cold expanse of space. Shit's pregnant like a chihuahua in a puppy mill, dirty and uncomfortably locked in some tiny cage that's covered in its own crap. It quickly becomes unbearable and you open your mouth and annihilate it like a grossly overpowered buster sword through a level one imp. “I didn't ask for it,” you say defensively. “I originally went in for a DJ job but I wasn't good enough and he said as much before getting all up on my dick like that one fish in the Amazon, y'know the reason they tell you not to piss in pools 'n shit. I said no and then all that horseshit happened and we were so fucking desperate—”

“You knew about this?” Jade's voice cuts into your speech for the umpteenth time this morning. You'd make something of it except Jade isn't in the mood to be messed with at the moment and you'd like to keep your balls. At first you are confused about the question until you notice she's not looking at you anymore. No, her eyes are fixed on Rose, propped stiffly on the edge of the couch like she's about to fly away. John gets hit by the recognition a second later and whips his head around toward Rose as well, breaking the baleful puppy stare he'd been leveling at you.

Rose shifts, not giving away much; pointless, considering how well you all can read her. “Dave spoke to me about it in confidence, yes.”

Jade shoots up, fists balled. “You— And you didn't tell us?”

“What, against his wishes?” Her lips turn down. You can see smudges of dark lipstick on the corner of her mouth, like she put it on then wiped it off without paying attention. “I wasn't in an easy position. I had to choose between betraying Dave’s trust and lying to you both—”

“He was hurting himself!” she exclaims, voice pitching upward. “You just let it happen!”

“Whoa now,” you say. “Don't blame Rose for that. That's on me. I made her swear—”

“Promises don't matter if one of us is in danger!”

Rose tilts her head, even tone wobbling dangerously. “I wonder if you'd say the same if it was your secret at risk.”

Jade throws her arms up wildly. “I don't have secrets! I actually trust my friends!”

“It must be nice to have the luxury of a life you can be open about.”

“ _Excuse_ me?”

“Yo,” you say, getting a bit desperate. “Don't take this out on each other, this ain't no one's fault but mine.”

The air is so thick it's hard to breathe. Jade looks ready to snatch Rose's headband off and flog her with it. “You think I've never had anything worth hiding? God, you think your life is harder than mine somehow? We fucking live together, you jerkface! When was the last time you ever had to deal with something alone?”

“Let's see. It could have been when Dave relied on me entirely to support him through—”

“I said had; you didn't have to do that on your own!”

“With the way you're reacting now, do you blame him for not trusting you?”

“I'm not—”

It's so quiet you almost miss it. You almost rewind a few seconds on instinct just to catch it, but John raises his voice just enough for you to hear the timid, “Guys.” The girls shut up, looking over their shoulders at him, but John's eyes are downcast, his brow heavily lined. “Is this because of me?”

You jump over Rose and Jade's hurried motions to reassure him. “Fuck no,” you spit, and then you jump over the coffee table too, barely missing knocking over Jade's sticky, neglected coffee mug. You go to your knees before him and make a grab for his hands. “John, this is so far from your fault it's not even in the same timeline, bro. It's like fifty degrees separated from anything even remotely connected to your shit. Whatever you ever done wrong is so different from what happened here that I can't even conceive of the circumstances mandated by paradox space to connect the two, even amongst the infinite possibilities available to our shitty excuses for an existence.”

“If I hadn't lost my job,” John says, still not meeting your eyes. “If the piano—”

“Fuck the piano,” you say. “I did it because I wanted to. I did it because I could handle it.”

“Can you, though?” You shift to look at Jade, but John's head stays bowed.

“I...”

Jade lowers herself onto the couch, one hand pushing her thick hair back from her face while the other settles on John's shoulder, uncharacteristically light. “You fucked up big time!” she says, expression twisted, “And you're doing drugs and treating us like shit! Like we're strangers. Shitty strangers.”

You snort weakly, grimacing. “I'm just stressed is all.”

“If you can't handle it without getting stressed enough to act like a complete loser, is that really handling it?”

It's a good question. You want to say yes, because you can't afford to not have this job. None of you can. Letting them talk you into quitting would be a very bad idea. “Just because I made some mistakes doesn't mean my job's bad, it's just me being an idiot.”

“If I may, your usual antics aren't quite at this level of recklessness.”

“Hey, whose side are you on?”

Rose shrugs. “The side with the least damage.” You open your mouth, and then close it, because… well.

“I think it's obvious what we need to do,” Jade says, breaking the quiet that falls over the four of you. Your fingers clench. “Dave can't keep working at this—”

“ _Jade_ ,” you say, desperately.

“Let's think about this,” Rose says.

Jade pounds her fist on the table. “No excuses, from either of you! You're the ones who got us into this mess, and I'm getting us out of it.”

You can't contain it, which says some bad things about what's happened to your self control, but the words burst out without your permission. “What _us_?”

Three sets of eyes settle on you, blinking, staring. “Dave... what?”

You shoot to your feet and walk around the table, trying to move so you don’t curl in on yourself like a terrified pillbug, but also putting distance between you and them because maybe they won’t see your face turning red. This is it. You're fit to crack. “Can we stop pretending like this is salvageable? Please? Stop with the crap acting like there's some way we can move past this. I already know what's gotta happen here, so you can all just...” You aren't going to cry. You aren't going to cry. You aren't going to— “break up with me already.”

If you thought you knew the meaning of 'silence' before, you were an idiot. There is nothing more heart-wrenchingly _nothing_ as the living room right now. They don't even look at you. Everyone freezes in place, and you know, you _know_ that you punched the elephant in the room in the trunk and now it's on a rampage, breaking everything in sight, except all that's here are the soon-to-be-gone fragments of your broken family.

Jade steps up on the table. It's good she's not wearing her boots, but it groans under her weight anyway. She's almost as tall as you, and twice as muscular. You think she's going to kill you.

She walks right up to you and grabs your shirt and you're legitimately scared. You almost rewind time to try and undo what you said, but your powers don't work so reliably anymore. (You'd tried to rewind the piano's timeline when no one else was around but you couldn't take it back far enough. It was too big, too damaged.) By the time you return back to present-moment, it's in time to hear Jade say, “How _dare_ you.”

“Um,” you respond, dumbly.

“Who the hell do you think you are?” Jade yells, directly in your face.

“I,” you start, but she cuts you off.

“After all we've been through and you're just going to _fucking walk out?_ ”

You jerk away from her like she burned you. “I'm not walking anywhere! I just, I just figured...”

“Incorrectly! You're fucking wrong!”

You're so busy being defensive that it takes a few seconds before you realize what she's getting at. “Wait,” you say, chest swelling with delirious hope. “So you're not—”

“ _No_ ,” Jade screams, punching you in the stomach. “We're _not breaking up with you!_ ” It takes Jade a moment to register the shocked expressions on John and Rose's faces, and that you're currently on the ground, gasping for breath.

She did not pull that punch. Not even kind of.

“Oh, fuck,” Jade says, and drops to pat you on the back until you can breathe again. “I didn't mean to do that,” she says in some weak attempt at reconciliation.

“S'fine,” you wheeze, clutching your midsection. “Deserved it.”

“Maybe not that, exactly,” Rose says, drier than the Sahara. Your solar plexus emphatically agrees, but it lacks the fortitude to say so.

“Maybe we should regain some perspective here,” John suggests.

“Excellent idea,” Rose adds quickly. She brushes off her skirt as she stands, then walks around the table like a civilized person to gently take Jade’s arm. “First, let’s get you a safe distance away. Dave has work tonight.” The audible gasp that runs around the room does not exclude yours truly, and you forget about not being able to breathe long enough to stare up at Rose in shock, your ‘what?’ chorusing with Jade’s much louder, angrier interjection. Rose smiles: serene, dangerous, and oh. You hope _they_ don’t kill each other. “While I respect your objections, Jade, I refuse to be barred from speaking any longer. We’re all in agreement that Dave’s behaviour has been unacceptable, but his dedication to our family has also been invaluable on the topic of keeping us comfortable in our home. Do any of you disagree?” She looks to Jade, then John, and neither of them offer up an objection, though you can tell Jade badly wants to. “Exactly. Therefore, I propose a compromise.”

“Dave has to stop doing drugs,” says John, jumping on the wagon faster than— well, no. It was a pretty predictable move, actually.

“Agree,” volunteers Jade, though she just as quickly falls silent again.

Rose nods stiffly. “I believe it would also be beneficial for counseling to appear somewhere in our future budget. In the meanwhile, some system of accountability should be set up—”

“Me,” Jade cuts in again, much more forcefully this time. She gently pulls her body parts out of Rose’s grasp. “You’ve already been in on his tricky business without doing anything about it.” Rose looks hurt, abashed, and Jade softens. Almost imperceptibly, but. “I get that it was hard for you, but it doesn’t have to be your responsibility anymore.”

“What about John?” you ask, stupidly. Really, you were just curious.

Jade’s head whips around so she can more effectively narrow her eyes at you. “John is weak.”

“Wow,” you deadpan. John is laughing. “Harsh, Jade.”

“Yes, I will be.” You are once again scared of her, and so, so much in love. They aren’t leaving you. Your life is going to be some carceral, micromanaged hell and your family is staying together and you couldn’t be happier.

You can’t help it. “Should I get the riding crop or the flogger?”

A snigger is aborted by Rose’s fist pressing against her mouth, and Jade looks half a second from cracking, but miraculously keeps a straight face. “You wish, fuckface.”

“That too.” If she was in range, she’d probably punch you.

“On the subject,” Rose says, collecting the last vestiges of composure, “Are there any more punishments, criticisms, or flagellations we would like to deposit on the back of our rightfully-scorned boyfriend?”

Jade makes a show of thinking about it, but it’s John who answers. “I think Dave should have to clean the house. It’s really gross and Rose won’t do it and I don’t want to.”

“Should I be investing in a sexy maid outfit, or a puppy play costume.”

“How about a garbage bag?” Jade suggests.

“Actually,” muses Rose, “I think we have the latter.”

“A garbage bag?” John asks, slightly alarmed.

“No, the one before that. Remember the—”

“Oh, fuck no.” You catch on to Rose’s implication a second before Jade does; her face lights up, and you clap a hand over your eyes and wish for a merciful death.

She crows, “Fuck _yes!_ ” and bolts from the living room with the swiftness of a coursing river and the force of a great typhoon. You hear her footsteps pounding through the house like a horse’s hooves, powerful and vengeful. You are so, so full of regret.

When Jade returns, she’s clutching a small planet’s worth of purple yarn. By the time she triumphantly deposits the mess in a pile at your feet, John and Rose have doubled over laughing. At first glance it looks like the burial ground where unfinished sweaters go to die, but you know better than that. You know each paw-printed mitten and floppy ear was knitted with care, because you weren’t joking about Rose having a lot of time on her hands. You remember the intense debates on what would be the best technique for the tail, and the time Rose threw her ball of yarn across the room because she couldn’t get the hood exactly right.

How this monstrosity came to be involved another period where your family was short on cash and Jade was forced into selling one of her most prized possessions: a custom, full-body fursuit that was offered to John as payment for some manual labor. You’d designed it to look like Bec. Rose’s replacement was much purpler, but crafted with love. Jade never actually wore them, but they were nice trophies for her time spent being fused with a radioactive dog. (She’s admitted to missing the ears. You haven’t admitted it, but you kinda miss them too.)

“Put it on,” Jade instructs.

You think of protesting that it won’t fit you, but Rose made it loose on Jade, which will compensate well enough for the height difference. That, and Jade steals your clothes all the time. You try something else. “I thought y’all were gonna let me keep my job. Are we demoting me from breadwinner to house slave?”

Rose looks at her wrist, which doesn’t have a watch on it. “It’s not even noon yet,” she says, and she’s technically right. It’s barely eleven; the whole trial only took 36 minutes (and counting), and it’s not even too late for breakfast. “You have more than enough time to get the bathroom clean before you have to get ready.”

Nudging your toe under one of the pieces, you lift up the fluffy sweater top until you can grab it without bending over. God. It doesn’t even have finger holes. The end of each arm is a completely closed mitten. How the hell are you supposed to clean in this? “Keep going,” urges Jade, crawling over the poor, misused coffee table and spilling more of her cold coffee in the process. She parks herself in John’s lap and crosses her arms. Their combined stares are crushingly expectant.

“Can y’all just break up with me instead?” you ask, and Rose throws a pillow at you. You let it hit, and then shrug into the garment of your humiliation. It’s some combination of scratchy-uncomfortable and really soft, so fluffy it irritates your skin. By the time you’ve pulled the hood up over your uncombed hair and figured out where the thumbhole is in the oversized paw hands, Rose has joined Jade and John on the couch, curled against them and looking extremely satisfied with herself. You stand in the middle of the room, a little bit less on the chopping block and a little bit more on display. You’d construct a joke about their weird fetishes to keep yourself from curling up in discomfort, but she smirks her bare, smudged lips and crooks a finger at you.

You go like the dog you are, and hope the coffee table doesn’t break.

They don’t let you hesitate from fear or insecurity before six grasping hands extend and pull you straight into the cluster of bodies like the most loving horrorterror ever conjured up by paradox space. You end up sharing John’s lap with Jade, Rose pressed against your back with her arms wrapped around your chest. ‘I’m sorry,’ you mouth to anyone who’s watching your face, which turns out to be all of them. Rose runs her hands up and down, stroking you through the thickly knit material, while John pushes a hand under the hood and cups the back of your neck. Jade jams the crown of her head under your chin with such force that your teeth click together and you regret that you’re not big enough to fit all three of them in your arms at the same time.

The four of you stay tangled together until Rose realizes that she’s been supporting both yours and Jade’s weight and her muscles raise protest, at which point she shoves until your bodies relocate to positions that are more comfortable but less entwined. You’d complain, but you get a Rose in your lap for your trouble and end up forehead-to-forehead with Jade, John’s arm stretched out along the back of the couch for all of you to lean against.

Jade runs her fingertips up Rose’s spine and doesn’t break eye contact with you, her voice sweet with promise as she whispers, “If you ever do anything like this again, I’m breaking your legs.”

“You think that’s the worst threat you could levy at me,” you respond, reaching out to ham-handedly brush a stray lock of dark hair behind her ear, “but the weird purple dog suit humiliation play is actually way worse than a couple months on crutches.”

“I’m glad we agree,” she says decisively, and dodges your mouth at the last second, instead landing a rough, chaste kiss that squashes your nose. Before you can decide how you feel about that, Jade pries Rose away from where she’s warm and pliant against your body. “Now, before you get too comfortable, you have a bathroom to clean.”

“What.” You’d actually started to believe that they were joking.

“I hope you didn’t think we were joking about that!” Oops.

You clear your throat and lean away from them, stretching your woolen arms and refusing to ponder on how cute the girls look with Rose all suckered onto Jade now that you’re off limits. “I had a moment of temporary insanity in which I forgot that the people I love most in the world are psychotic torture fetishists who receive intense sexual enjoyment from watching me run the metaphorical gauntlet.”

“Aw, did you hear that, guys? Dave said he loves us.”

“Foolish of him to forget our true nature, though.”

“Speaking of sexual enjoyment,” Jade says, snickering at Rose and John’s banter, “I think it’s time to let off some steam! Fortunately, all of our chores for the day have been miraculously recalibrated, so we have plenty of time to work out every possible kink.”

You’re expected to complain, and not really go into the fact that, no matter how deserved it may be, this whole ‘withholding intimacy’ thing is actually lowkey bothering you, but John groans and steals the spotlight. “Do we _have_ to?”

“I hope not,” Rose says, finally detaching from Jade and easing herself to her feet. “I’m not entirely prepared for even the gentlest round of make-up sex, at the moment. I’d actually like more sleep.”

Jade pouts, and John laughs. “This is why we buy her vibrators.”

“Indeed,” Rose agrees.

They’re all smiling. This was, truly, the best possible outcome. You slip away before any of them can draw you back into the conversation, hiding the flush of your cheeks under the hood of your shame suit. How ungrateful can you be, anyway, sulking about being left out of the trust circle when you were the one who ran his fool ass out of bounds in the first place?

Foul, Strider. Fucking foul. Back to square one.

Square one turns out to be the bathroom, because you’re a man and you’ll serve your sentence with pride and dignity—or neither, because you remember belatedly that you’re wearing a purple fursuit. You start with clorox in the sink, try to figure out how to use your phone while letting it sit, and avoid making a scene when Jade swings in to drop off the bottom of the suit and supervise as you put it on. A grin and a wink later and she’s gone, leaving you to decide whether or not you should try to keep chemicals off your yarn prison.

In the end you decide that if they cared about the fursuit’s integrity they wouldn’t make it the janitorial uniform, so you are not careful handling the bleach-soaked rag.

The toilet turns out to be the easiest thing to clean, because you just use the long-handled scrubby for all the icky parts. The bathtub and floor present a more unique challenge. You’re contemplating crawling out the window and making this dog suit your sad, furry coffin, but a voice from the door interrupts your mental shitfit.

“Need help?”

You look ridiculous, which you realize immediately when John appears in the doorway while you’re perched awkwardly on the side of the tub, attempting to use the long-handled toilet scrubby to clean the inside of the basin without soaking too much of your cloth prison, regardless of how gross it might be. “No,” you say automatically, “What would give you that impression.”

“You just look like—” John begins, and then tilts his head. “Dave, is that the toilet scrubber?” Your face answers the question, and he sighs out an ‘ew’ before entering the small space and grabbing a nearby rag. He elbows you out of the way and runs some fresh water into the tub, starting to scrub away your sins.

For about a minute you stand uselessly in the middle of the bathroom, holding the scrubby in your paw. “I thought you didn’t want to clean,” you say finally, at a loss.

“I don’t,” John says, wrinkling his brow as he puts far more effort into getting the grime off than you were. “But we need to talk.”

Oh.

Very slowly, like he’s a deer who might spook, you set the scrubby behind the toilet, and then sit down on the seat. “Guess I don’t need to ask what about.”

John snorts. “Hopefully not.”

“John, I—”

“Okay, no.” John is no longer scrubbing, and is instead sitting on his heels, a hand on his thigh as he frowns at you. “I get that you are sorry… But I think this has to go farther than just you apologizing? I know it makes you feel bad to hear this stuff, but if you keep apologizing like crazy, no one can get out anything they need to say.”

“I wasn’t—”

“Shhhh, Dave. Only listening now.” You fall mute, and stare at the floor. “Aw, c’mon, buddy! I’m not going to sit on your chest and yell at you. You look like a,” he pauses, repressing a soft snicker, “a kicked puppy.”

The joke dies quickly when you don’t laugh. “I look like I almost raped my boyfriend,” you say bitterly, nastier than you mean to.

John quiets. “I don’t think you would have gone that far,” he hedges.

“Don’t matter how far,” you mumble, scrubbing your wrist over your bare eyes. “What happened was far enough.”

“Okay but. What happened?”

You blink. “What?”

“I just had a thought. Start telling the story from the beginning, and we are going to point out the wrong shit so you know how to avoid it if it comes up again.”

Incredulous, you wonder, “Did I revert back to single digits without realizing it? Because that sounds pretty goddamn idealistic, John. Like life is just one of those ‘guess the differences’ games with the same picture twice, but a spider’s missing a leg and the dude’s meticulously plucked eyebrows are now haggard and overgrown, like some bitter metaphor for his soul. Look. This isn’t kindergarten. You aren’t making me show my work on a math test so we can pinpoint exactly where I forgot how to add.”

“Actually yes,” John says, “we are doing that.”

Words get caught in your throat, and then explode. “Oh, _well then_ , I guess we are in kindergarten after all. Thank you, Tzar Egbert, for deigning to personally deliver your decree to the lowly bathroom-cleaning plebeians of the economical furry underbelly. Little David is going to take his seat now and be forcefed a mixture of applesauce and his most recent and painful mistakes, and he’s going to be goddamn thankful for it, or else.” You run your mono-digited hand through your bangs and sigh and wish you know where they put your shades.

“You can continue throwing a tantrum and pretend there’s someone around who cares about what you are saying, but it’s not going to change anything. My opinion is the one with the most staying power right now,” he says, “considering reasons.” Yes, reasons. You can agree with that. “So either you can stop being a big whiny baby and start doing things my way, or I can call Jade.”

Snorting, you rivet your stare in a dusty corner of the tile floor and snark, “And tell her what, exactly. That you changed your mind and want to kick me out after all?”

For several seconds, John is quiet. “You keep playing this card, like you think that you can copy Rose’s powers of emotional manipulation, but what no one told you before now is that you’re actually really bad at it and mostly just sound like an ass.”

“Sorry,” you respond immediately, ashamed.

You see John wave his hand dismissively out of the corner of your eye. “Seriously. Stop apologizing. I’m going to have Rose psychoanalyze out my inner highschool jock that never was and have him shove your head in the toilet.”

“I’ve been wanting a new hairdo,” you muse. You don’t search for John’s stern look but you feel it anyway. “Okay,” you concede. “Gimme a moment to think.” John waits patiently (you think) and doesn’t say a goddamn word, forcing you to break the silence. “Well I guess my biggest fuck-up was popping a pill I didn’t know nothin’ about.”

“No,” he says.

“No?”

John shakes his head for emphasis. “That was definitely not the beginning. Try again.”

“Damn it,” you sigh, and close your eyes, and put a mitten hand over your brow to try and hide yourself, and work on encapsulating the memories. “I didn’t tell y’all about the job.”

“Why didn’t you?”

You flinch. “I didn’t trust you. I’m s— I’m. Uh.” John looks like he doesn’t want to ask you to extrapolate again, but this is harder than you expected to be. He waves his hand a little to get you going. “I didn’t th—” God, fuck. “I didn’t think y’all would understand. Like you’d think it was dirty or somethin’.”

Tilting his head, John says, “I mean, you did get started on a drug habit.” Your face screws up and your hand curls into a fist, which John notices immediately. “Heyyy, buddy. Calm down. I won’t interrupt again.” When you don’t uncurl, he drops to his knees and reaches over to nudge you. “Now I’m going to be the one saying sorry, Dave!”

It takes an agonizing number of minutes before you’ll unclench, during which John switches from worried, to reprimanding, to threatening to call Rose. Finally you sag, dropping your hand, and although you immediately recalibrate into pulling your knees onto the toilet seat so you can hug them against your chest, you actually look at John afterward, which is something of an improvement. “Can I,” you start, then hesitate. If you change your mind about what you’re going to say you don’t let on to it, but regardless, what comes out is, “If we’re going to have this conversation, can I at least take off the top?”

Where Jade might have hesitated, John doesn’t, nodding immediately. “Yeah, I don’t think the humiliation angle is—” You have the stupid itchy dog sweater off before he finishes the sentence, and you don’t care what he says next because you throw it on the ground and then sit on it, somehow wedging your long, skinny limbs into the space between the toilet and the radiator. “Whoa, Dave, that is not an improvement! Okay, come out now. Dave?” John swears, and you hear scrabbling, and then he’s boxing you in, large blue eyes wide with concern. “I would like to make a concession,” he says.

“Yeah?”

“It was selfish before to say my opinion matters most here.” Your brow crumples and you stare up at him, confused. John takes his time settling down in front of you before he continues. “I think, when it comes to the immediate issue, we have to deal with how you made me feel.” You nod, because that part you understand. “But,” John says, and you don’t know what to do after that, so you stare forlornly and wait. “I think we _also_ have to deal with what you went through to get to the point of taking drugs to cope, which lead to you being unable to control yourself.”

“It’s not like that,” you say helplessly, not sure how you’re going to explain this.

John settles down, resting his arm on the toilet seat and propping his chin up with it. “Okay, I’m listening.”

You study him for a few seconds, and then say, “you’re lucky I just washed that thing.”

Snickering, John says, “Fortunately I’m not a germaphobe. Keep talking.”

You clear your throat, and scrub your hands over your face, reveling in the feeling of skin instead of wool. “The drug stuff was a total fluke,” you begin. “It’s exactly what I was trying to avoid, but more’n that, it was an _accident_. It’s not… It’s not something I expected, or predicted, or really believed would happen? My coworker gave it to me to help through a low moment, and I swear I’d never done drugs like that before, I didn’t even get that drunk. I mean, sometimes I got buzzed, but everyone did. And it’s not just this job that makes people wanna get drunk to cope, so, y’know.” John nods, because you’ve all had your weak moments, and you know he’s gone out drinking with Jade just as many times as he’s gone out drinking with you, though the three of you refuse to be caught at it at the same time because it’d feel like y’all were betraying Rose, somehow.

He doesn’t say anything, though, and that makes it harder, because you have to figure out how to get the next part out. “This mess, it’s, uh. It’s exactly the kinda hot shit I didn’t want to happen. It’s why I didn’t tell y’all in the first place.”

“I’m not sure I am on the same page anymore,” John says, hesitant.

“What do you think when you hear of strippers?”

“...Poles?” says John, unsure like he’s half guessing, half being completely honest.

You choke a bit, then wipe your mouth with the back of your wrist. “Well, I can’t… you’re not wrong. But let me help you out a bit. You prob’ly think of shit like this, too. Letting yourself go, doing drugs, getting fucked up, ruining your life. Right?”

“No, but okay,” John says.

“Bullshit,” you counter, pouting almost like you _want_ it to be true. Which you don’t. But you also don’t want to be wrong and look like an idiot.

“If it makes you feel better, Dave, we can pretend I have an opinion about strippers that coincidentally sounds exactly like what you just said.”

It derails your speech, and you stutter, then burn out. “I was afraid that was what you’d think of me? I didn’t. I didn’t want you or Jade thinkin’ that, like I was cheating on you or letting myself go or fucking myself up, because I _wasn’t_. Yeah, it was a job, and sometimes jobs are hard, but. But other times it was good. And fun. An’, it was really good sometimes? I forgot what it was like, bein’ happy outside of you guys.”

“So, if it was good,” John begins, “how did it still lead to this?” He seems to be open to hearing your explanation despite not fully understanding, which is better than you hoped for.

“That.” You stop, and frown. “It got tough, and I didn’t have enough of anyone to pull me through it, I guess. Yaz was just tryin’ to help me cope by myself and yeah, I _should have_ said no, but I didn’t. That’s on me, and we’ll get back to that, but…” Trailing off, you start to flounder, your hand doing something in the air to take the place of speech.

“Did you tell Rose?”

You want to hide behind your hands again. God, where the fuck are your shades. “No. She figured it out on her own, ‘cuz she’s brilliant an’ stuff. But you can’t blame her for cracking when I put so much pressure on her. It ain’t her fault. She did her best to support what she could and in the end it just got a li’l too heavy for both of us.”

John’s brow scrunches, and you’re about to try and explain better but he speaks: “What I am hearing is that this has less to do with any prejudice that Jade or I might have had about stripping, and more to do with you being a total loser like usual.”

You snort. “Yeah, that’s fair.”

“Okay, cool. I understand better. Hey, Dave?” You make a nonverbal questioning sound, glancing up at him. “Can you come out from behind the toilet now? I’m getting kinda tired of cuddling this contraption when I’m not even hung over.”

The sound that leaves you is not exactly a laugh, nor is it a sob, but you try to move past it and instead extend your hand, silently requesting help because you’ve wedged yourself in so tightly you’re not fully sure you can get out on your own. John gets the hint and stands up first, then grasps around your wrist and pulls you carefully up from your shame corner. “Feel better?” he asks.

“No,” you respond, examining him cautiously through your eyelashes. You could really go for a hug right now, except the idea of touching John feels wrong in your gut, and even though he hasn’t dropped your arm it seems a disgusting thing to ask. You let your wrist hang limp in his grip, body all-over lax and motionless.

Your thoughtless study is derailed when you make the mistake of meeting John’s eyes and can’t look away from the way his dark brows furrow in concerned contemplation. You’re two bugs staring at each other through a microscope, except John is back to being impenetrable and you are weak like a live frog under pins, your entire body one twitching, exposed nerve… and you can’t escape, and it feels like his eyes are the pins, and his hand is the scalpel peeling you open so he can root around in your organs, because you _deserve it_. How dare you beg your paralyzed meat to wrap itself back together, squeezing so tightly it recedes back into the nothingness from whence you came—all so you can escape the violation of a stare. All so you can escape the guilt borne from _your_ violation.

John smiles, or winces in a general upward motion, and clasps a hand on the back of your neck. “I think it’s time to be done.”

Blinking your eyes—they’re dry, and your eyelids stick on your tacky retinas—you try for a questioning sound and instead get out ‘muh’ and then you try again and produce a stutter, which turns into a line of gibberish that you try not to hear yourself say, and ultimately ends with, “but I have so many more mistakes to pin to my clothesline of shame, and we can only rent the firehose for another hour. You don’t come across this kind of soul-searing water pressure every day, John.”

“Oh my god,” John says, “Do you hear yourself?”

“No,” you respond, because it’s a good answer pretty much all the time.

His hand, hands, both of them, leave your skin, only to come back on your hair, rustling it mercilessly under his palm. “Help me wash the floor, jack ass. You can take the pants off, but you have to put everything back on when you’re done so Jade doesn’t think I’m going soft.”

“Oh, Egbert,” you deadpan. “Your lenience is a balm on my tortured soul.”

“That toilet scrubber is about to be a balm on your tortured _face_.”

“John, no. Ew.”

“Don’t talk to me. You were using it to clean the bath tub. The thing _we_ get clean in, Dave!”

“E. coli is the balm of a tortured immune system, you know hunter-gatherers didn’t wash their dicks between anal and oral and they did just fine— okay! Okay.” You raise your hands in surrender, because John grabbed the dingy sinkside cup and started filling it up with cold water, the universal threat for ‘I am about to throw this in your face or down your back, depending on whether you try to escape or not.’

John raises his eyebrows, not unloading his weapon, watching as you ease the knit pants down your hips until you can step out of them, motions slow like you’re trying to prove to a trigger-happy police officer that you’re not going to pull a gun from between your balls like that scene in _Kiss Kiss Bang Bang_. Once disrobed, you cautiously kick the garment across the floor to John. “There’s your money,” you say. “Now let the girl go.”

A few seconds pass, and then John says, “Just like we agreed,” and pours the water down the sink. He immediately starts snickering, and you sag in relief.

“Thank god. My sexual reward for being the straight, white protagonist in a Hollywood film was almost tragically lost—”

“Shut up,” laughs John, as you sputter around the hand mop he just threw at you. You’ve been letting so many things hit you lately that you’re starting to forget you have the ability to dodge them. At least they’re throwing nice things, like pillows and rags meant for scrubbing foot gunk off the room in which people shit. By the time you’ve freed yourself, John is drawing water into the tub, which he just cleaned, and is now ironically about to put dirty water in. You don’t point it out, simply watching him pour a small amount of tile cleaner into the flowing stream before dipping his own hand mop into the frothy mixture that forms.

You follow suit and join him on the floor, both on your knees scrubbing in relative silence, until John pauses, rinses his mop, and then asks, fake casual, “So do your, uh, stripper friends know you’re dating someone?”

Snorting, you say, “By which you mean, do they know I’m in a borderline incestuous poly marriage with my three best friends from childhood?”

“I guess,” says John.

“No,” you say, and watch him tense up for a moment before you quickly continue, “not all of them. But they do know I’m experienced in all standardized sets of genitals and some really freaky ones, too.”

John snickers into the back of his hand, which he’s trying to use to push his glasses up without getting them wet. “Why don’t you just say you’re bisexual?”

Your face scrunches up. “You literally can’t make me.”

“I’m bisexual,” John says.

“Hi bisexual, I’m Dave.”

“Are you one of those fancy ones Rose is always talking about?”

“I'm Dave,” you repeat, refusing to budge.

John rolls his eyes. “Okay, Dave. Whatever.”

“You absolutely do not get to roll your eyes at me over sexual obstinance, Mr. I-am-not-a-homosexual.”

“Well, I'm not,” John says simply. “I like both.”

“Totally not what you meant when you said it, bro. Fortunately you realized just in time that dick is delicious.”

Nose scrunching, John stops scrubbing to give you a disapproving look. “I would not use that word for any sex act,” he says.

“Not even ones involving chocolate?”

“Why would you ruin chocolate by combining it with sex?”

“Ask Rose and Jade,” is all you say, mostly so you can snigger at his expression.

“This conversation has gone places,” John observes.

You rinse off your mop, then wring it out, pointedly not looking at John. “Was there a direction you meant for it to go instead?”

He seems almost as reluctant as you are to bring it up, but eventually admits, “yeah. It's not a big deal, though. I wouldn't even know how to fit it into conversation at this point.”

“Just say it.”

“Ergh,” says John.

You sigh, slapping the mop back onto the floor. “Cool. Good talk, bro.”

“What I was trying to do earlier,” John spits out, “was get you to identify for yourself what you did wrong.”

“What, so I can write uncomfortable sentences as punishment?”

“I don't want to punish you, Dave!”

“Coulda fooled me.”

John cradles the bridge of his nose. “I just want you to see for yourself what went wrong and resolve to fix it and not repeat your mistakes!”

You're silent for a few minutes, at which point you disbelievingly ask, “That's it?”

“Yeah,” says John. He sounds tired. “That's it.”

Rocking back on your heels, you stare at the toilet and think of crawling behind it again. “So… Why the fuck am I cleaning the bathroom.”

John snorts. “Because you live here, dumb ass.”

Your jaw hangs, and then you close it, and rub at the side of your face. “I. Can’t really argue with that.”

“Good,” John says. “Don’t. We’re almost done, anyway.”

You finally reach the base of the toilet, and John has to stop you from hurling the top of the fursuit into the chemical-and-dirt-filled tub under the guise of ‘cleaning’ it. It ends up sitting on the top of the toilet seat while you both finish scrubbing around the base of the toilet, which gets complicated for a moment when there runs out of dry, unscrubbed floor aside for the places your bodies are occupying. John picks you up on a wind gust and laughingly threatens to drop you into the tub, and then he drops you kinda on the _side_ of the tub because he gets that same pang all y’all do when he tries to control his miniscule powers too precisely. You complain about _more_ bruises you’re gonna have to hide tonight, and John goes all weirdly silent, and you think it’s maybe too soon for those kinds of jokes, so you apologize and let him slap you in the arm with his wet mop on the way to throwing it into the tub.

“I can finish cleaning up,” John says. “Everything is done, the rags just need to be rinsed and put away. You probably need some chill time.”

You agree with him, is the thing, which is why you get halfway out the bathroom before abruptly turning around to frown at him. “John. Hey. Wait.” He looks at you, eyes cloudy and unreadable. “You don’t deserve this,” you say, face drawing up into a pained wince.

“What? Dave, I can wash the rags, it’s okay—”

“That’s so far from what I’m talking about, dude,” you cut in, still feeling very much like you just chugged a glass of lemon juice. The bitterness in the back of your throat won’t go away even when you swallow.

“Okay,” John says, mostly lost.

You grab the doorjamb, scowl at nothing, and force the words out, “You shouldn’t have to pretend like it’s okay right now, especially not to make me feel better. S’not that I don’t appreciate it, cuz I do, but I… I’m gettin’ the feeling, like, if I take advantage of this now, it’s gonna backfire real bad in the future.” John’s brows furrow, but he doesn’t interrupt. “Because, I can’t imagine how much fucking betrayal you have to repress in order to deal with the person who was abusive toward you, like… bro, I know, I get it, it ain’t the same if you’re drunk or whatever and it’s a one time accident, I’m still me, but that doesn’t _change_ dick shit. You still felt it. I still did it, right?” You drag a hand down your face, drawing in a ragged breath. “I didn’t just fuck up. I seriously wronged you, and it’s not just like, the amount of trust I was worried about losing in you is what you actually lost in me, whether or not you feel it right now, and… you just… you deserve better.”

“Dave…”

“I’m sorry. I’ll never be able to encapsulate words that don’t suck at conveying how truly an’ fuckin’ genuinely apologetic I feel for what I did to you last night. I need you to like, let yourself be mad, I guess. Thanks an’ all, for bein’ understanding and helping me, but don’t… I. Don’t do it anymore, I guess. Because this is on me to deal with, right now, and you need to take time to let yourself actually process what happened and be mad ‘n’ sad and whatever else about it, because if you don’t, like… you’ll never trust me again, if I don’t give you this opportunity. Y’know?”

John scrubs at the back of his neck, visibly uncomfortable. “Is this a time thing?”

“Naw,” you say, shrugging your shoulders. “I mean, probably not? I dunno, maybe. I’m not peepin’ on the timeline or anything, that’s Rose’s job, I’m just sayin’... I know you, you’re my best fucking friend, and I’ve talked to Rose long enough to know _people_ , and I’ve seen a lot of betrayal and felt it myself and… I know how this this works, so trust me?”

“Trust you about being mad at you?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay,” is all John says. You watch him for a few seconds more, and then nod, and then turn out the bathroom door. He doesn’t say anything to stop you as you leave.

* * *

Things manage to get worse. Rather, nothing gets markedly worse so much as you discover a way to feel more horribly than you already did, which considering you spent over ten minutes hyperventilating behind a toilet, is… uh.

Jade drops you off at work. She’s going to pick you up, too. You feel like you’re in prison, and are surprised she didn’t make you sit in the tiny ass back seat of her truck just so you didn’t get any delusions of being an equal and welcomed participant in the ride rather than inconvenient cargo being shuffled back and forth from the rock quarry. You know it will get better, but it still hurts your sensitive parts when she glares at the road and doesn’t talk and avoids your eyes when you say goodbye.

It it made sense for you to be preoccupied, but in retrospect you could have spared yourself a few minutes from worrying about your family to consider, possibly, what might have happened with your coworkers.

It’s subtle. A twitch of a smile then eyes darting away, a hush when you walk into the dressing room. You want to cut open your stomach and crawl inside it so you can dissolve in your own acids.

Nova sets his stuff next to yours in the dressing room. You stare at the mirror and try to keep your hand from shaking as you apply mascara (because weeks ago Nova told you your blonde eyelashes were too pale to properly frame your eyes in the harsh club lights and made you look like a half naked banshee). He takes off his shirt, which you can’t help but see in your peripheral, and starts lining his arms with different colours of bangles. There’s an entire ziplock bag of them, so you figure he’s going to be there a while, and make a point to get dressed and out of the room as quickly as possible.

You tug on a sparkly purple crop top that you actually got from the Juniors section of JC Penny on clearance and jam sneakered feet through the holes of a pair of booty shorts with the ass in shreds. Your hair is gonna have to be a casualty because Nova is putting on those bracelets with alarming speed and you need to be anywhere but here.

“Des. Wait.” _Fuuuuuuuuck_.

You look over your shoulder like a puppy that was just caught shitting on the rug. Nova looks like he was just caught watching.

“C’mere.” You stare at him with confusion until he shoves his still half full bag of jewellery aside and grabs a large poofy make-up brush. It’s so not the time to play dress up, but you resist the urge to argue. Getting it over with so he can go back to cowardly conflict aversion sounds like the best plan here. Nova manages to avoid eye contact while simultaneously staring at your face, which is… great. He dresses your freckled cheeks with a healthy amount of violet shimmer. “Hey, uh.” You raise your eyebrows. “I just wanted to say I was sorry,” he begins, and you step away like you’ve been burned, leaving his brush hanging in mid-air.

“Not necessary, man. Don’t think you have anything worth apologizin’ for.” The dressing room is suddenly quiet and you need to _leave_.

Nova follows you out, looking much less contrite and much more _Karkat_ as he seizes your wrist and pulls you to the side where there’s fewer prying eyes and ears. “Don’t fucking turn your back on me—”

“Scar,” you say automatically, and then flush when Nova pauses his rage to appear confused. “Sorry, it’s uh. Mufasa, like, Lion King? The Disney movie, that’s a line—”

“Oh my god,” Nova says. “Shut up. I’m trying to tell you—”

“And I’m trying to tell you it’s _not necessary_ —”

“Shut up!” And then Nova shoves the handle of the makeup brush in your mouth, longways, like the bit of a horse. “Bite down,” he instructs, and you are terrified, so you do. “Keep it there. If it falls you’re buying me a new one,” he says, pulling his hand away. “It was fucked up of me to not be straight with you about having a shit time the other day. You’re new at this still and we all know it, and I kinda made it a point of having your back, so even if you’re an obnoxious little shit literally all the time I should have expected that you’d seek help when I wasn’t able to give it eventually, and I handled it like a goddamn ass pimple so I’m gonna take this opportunity—this blessed moment of silence in your presence—to man up and admit that I was a pit stain and take responsibility for—”

You remember you have hands, and take the make-up brush out of your mouth. “Can you not.” He looks incensed, about ready to kill you, but you hold up a hand as a gesture of ‘peace, brother’ and also ‘wait, I’m not finished.’ “I accept your apology, dude, I just don’t want to hear you rant about it, okay? I get it. Thanks.”

Nova doesn’t look especially appeased, but at least he doesn’t shank you by surprise when you hand him the brush back. “If it’s ever an emergency,” he says, “just remind me of the other night and I’ll be too guilty to not listen to you stress ramble.”

“Stress ramble. Got it.” Wait. Which night is he referring to?

You don’t have the time to ask, because Nova sights something over your shoulder and says immediately, “Okay, I have to finish getting ready. Later, Des,” and by the time you realize he’s shimmied away like the saltiest little eel, you’ve already been bodyslammed face-first against the wall.

It’s confusing more than traumatizing, because after the first few seconds it starts to feel more like a hug than it does a violent assault. There is a clatter at your feet that turns out to be a fallen white cane. “Yyyyaz?” you ask hesitantly. “I get that you’re into all sorts of weird shit, but energy vampirism probably should involve some kind of safeword, or like, prior consent, I’m not really sure, I might have to negotiate a contract and sign a waiver first—”

“ _Dave_ ,” she says, and when you squirm enough to spy her over your shoulder it’s obvious there are tears in her eyes.

“Hey, officer, you can’t out me like this,” you say gently, twisting in her grip. You pat the top of her (hornless) head.

“Sorry,” she says, and you wish there was room for literally anything in your pockets because there’s snot dripping from her nose like a goddamn fountain.

Hell. “I gotta piss,” you say, even though you don’t, and pick up her cane in one hand and steer her with the other. She can’t mistake the sound of a crummy latch engaging as you lock her with you in the handicapped stall, but she doesn’t say anything, which means she either knows you just want to talk or is actually okay with you peeing in front of her. You don’t even like peeing in front of John, so that is an absolute hard no.

You set her cane aside, then rip off some toilet paper and hand it to her. “Babe,” you say, “Waterworks are for after the performance, not before.”

Yazmin stares at you with the toilet paper crumpled in her brown fingers, eyes dry and expression miserable while snot still streams freely over her lips. “I’m so sorry,” she repeats, and you sigh.

“Wipe your face, Yaz.”

“I didn’t mean to, to,” she hiccups, waving her hands, including the one holding the tissue. “I wanted to help.”

You grab more toilet paper and approach her slowly, sighing extra hard so she’ll hear it. You don’t know how well she can see in this shitty lighting, and she isn’t wearing her thick glasses so you doubt the shapes are anywhere near clear. Yaz turns her face toward you, opening her posture, and you take her chin lightly between your fingers. “You’re a goddamn spigot,” you comment, wiping her nose like a tired mom. “And I don’t want your apology.” You throw the used tissue at the toilet, and miss. “I shoulda told you no, but that’s not on you, it’s on me. I’m a big boy, probably, I did the DARE program, I know how to speak up for myself.”

“You trusted me,” Yazmin sniffles.

“This ain’t an issue of trust, Yaz. I’m not—”

“Dave,” she presses, “I’m a drug addled blind chick with a secret furry fetish, but I’m not a fucking idiot. I’m aware that people whose most extensive experience with drugs is the occasional blunt are not as used to recreational usage as my friends, and I shouldn’t be handing stuff out like candy at a birthday party! It’s not stripping you of your autonomy to admit that I _fucked up_.”

You motion helplessly even though she can’t see it. “I get that, but it’s not your responsibility to know my limitations. For all you know I coulda handled it and shit might have been fine, and maybe I wouldn’t have— wait, you’re a closet furry?” Her eyes flick down, then back up, and she hazards a guilty smile. You press your lips together and huff through your nose. “You’re a real piece of work, you know that? Just when I thought you couldn’t get more like Terezi, you—”

Fuck. Maybe you weren’t supposed to take it that far.

“Terezi?” Yazmin repeats the word, head cocking to the side. You can almost imagine her trying to taste the syllables as they roll over her tongue. You wait for her to ask who she was, trying to think of a lie and failing, but Yaz touches your chest right over the sparkly screenprint graphic, her brow furrowing. “Was that… me?”

You _tch_ , patting the back of her hand, feeling how she presses her fingertips into the texture. Your chest expands. “As much as an alternate universe alien can be mimicked in an ordinary human, sure. Call it reincarnation if y’wanna.”

“I was an alien?”

Fuck times two. “Look, Yaz,” you say, removing your hand from hers. It rakes through your hair, which is going to look terrible after all this abuse and neglect, but you don’t care. Maybe she’ll fix it before you leave. You’re probably both supposed to be on the floor soon, and someone is going to be mighty pissed if they have to hunt y’all both down, so… “I don’t exactly know how much of this I oughta tell you. I don’t even know how much you’re prepared to believe.”

“You just told me I was an alien,” Yazmin says, shifting so her finger is jabbing into your chest. “You can’t just not follow up on that, Strider. I’m ready to believe anything.”

You fix her with a grim look, commenting, “You were a tiny alien with a hairtrigger bear trap for a mouth who was raised by a psychic dragon. You were blind then, too, and she taught you how to see by smelling and tasting colours.” It sounds implausible to your ears and you were _there_. You literally experienced her catching you unawares once so she could lick your actual eyeball, and you still have trouble believing it.

Yazmin’s jaw hangs for a good couple of seconds. You wait for her to call you out on all your bullshit and write you off permanently, but then she swallows and squeaks out, “a _dragon?_ ”

Snorting, you say, “Yeah. It was kinda tragic, though, not a good thing to talk about while in a bathroom stall where people were probably doing smack literally thirty seconds ago. Hey—”

“Oh my _god_ , it all makes _so much sense_ ,” Yaz squeals, gesticulating wildly. “Was she white?”

You blink. “Yeah, all the trolls— er.” You so aren’t in the position to start talking about lusii right now, but that’s okay because Yazmin is literally pulling up her shirt and hey wow she doesn’t wear a bra, awesome, uhhhhh— oh.

Tattooed in the middle of her sternum is—

You start laughing, because if you don’t you might cry. It’s a fucking white ass fucking dragon. Of course. It even has red eyes.

“I had dreams of her,” Yazmin says, eyes staring unfocused into the middle distance, but her expression is painfully sincere, pinched. You wonder what she saw. It must have sucked, all these years, to have no context to the things your brain—your past self, even—was convinced you needed to know. She’s still holding the hem of her shirt up above her boobs. You gently reach out and pull it free, smoothing it as it falls back over her hips.

“Yeah,” you say. “Dreams were a big thing.” You leave her reeling and unlock the bathroom door, stepping out into the still mercifully unoccupied bathroom. The water pressure on the sink is shit and the water comes out kind of yellow but you run it over your hands anyway, then splash some in your face, wiping your wet palms back through your fucked up hair.

God, you look terrible. Your face looks almost as hopeless as your life. You just washed off half of Nova’s glitter and smudged your mascara. You should have gone for the waterproof stuff but you thought it wouldn’t be necessary and wanted to save a few bucks, shows what you know, being a stripper involves way more waterworks than you originally anticipated…

“Hey.” A hand is fisted in the back of your shirt. “You’re going to tell me more, right?”

You sigh, eyes flicking to face her reflection in the mirror. (She looks so lost.) “I’m still not convinced telling you in the first place was a good idea.”

“Good idea? It was a great idea,” she says, letting go only so she can wave her hands in the air like she’s trying to communicate in the most fucked up sign language you’ve ever seen. “You don’t get it, I’ve been living with these weird shadows in my brain all my life, why do you think I do so many drugs? I like them, yeah, but it puts things into _focus_ , even for a while, and I. I… Dave… Please.”

She can’t see, and yet somehow her foggy eyes still manage to meet yours in the mirror. Terezi couldn’t reliably point to the broad side of a barn, but she always seemed to know the exact angle necessary to stare into your fucking soul. You laugh, uncomfortable.

Then you turn and frame her narrow neck with your hands, burying a kiss in her hair. “Aight, no more sloth sounds. I can’t stand those fucking videos. I’ll tell you more.” Her hand slaps clumsily over your face, and her chin jerks up, expression hopeful as she searches your skin for a lie. “But later,” you add, the words partially muffled under her hand. “Right now we have to work on not getting fired.”

Yazmin pulls her hand away. “Right,” she agrees. She fidgets with the hem of her shirt. “You promise?”

“Would I lie to you? No, really, do you honestly think you’d let me get away with that? Reassess yourself, girl. Also, don’t forget your cane.” She has no way of knowing where you put it down, so you go to grab it for her.

“Thanks,” she says, wrapping her hand around yours so you can’t let go of it just yet. “One more question.”

“I’m going to start charging,” you warn.

“I’ll pay you in dick pics,” Yazmin snaps back. “How do you know all this stuff?”

You pause, examining her, and then pull your hand out from under hers, patting it once as you draw away. “I’m a time traveler,” you say, and don’t wait to find out whether her face registers either trust or disbelief, because you’re not sure which one you actually care to see. It’s only a fraction of the truth anyway, and while you might entertain her with pieces of her past life, you’re never going to spill _that_ bucket of dirt noodles. Not with any amount of begging in the world.

You get all the way to the door before she snatches your collar and yanks you back. “If you honestly believe you’re going out with your hair like that,” she hisses, voice both exasperated and threatening. If nothing else, you appreciate your ability to have hair so bad even a blind girl can be offended by it.

* * *

Whatever ease you achieved over the course of the relatively tolerable work night is swiftly pushed to the side when you clear Prism’s doors, laughing at a bad joke of Kanti’s, and see Jade’s truck already waiting. Your face goes so immediately blank that you don’t bother coming up with an excuse—they can tell. Nova steps around to ruffle your hair and Kanti squeezes your palm and kisses the back of your knuckles. “You have our numbers,” she says, lingering nervously, even while Nova has already abandoned the premises and is making a beeline toward his car.

“I’ll be fine,” you mumble.

“Even so,” says Kanti, kissing your hand once more before she releases it.

You tug your hoodie tighter around your body, regretting your decision not to change. The hem is almost lower than the cut-off of your booty shorts.

“Hey,” you say into the open door, giving her plenty of warning that you are about to enter so you have time to dodge if she decides to pistolwhip you for whatever reason. You don’t even see a gun anywhere in the car, so you ease yourself in, not missing the critical look Jade gives your bare legs.

“It’s cold out,” she says, sounding both flat and helpless.

You shrug. “I’m always warm after work; I don’t really feel it, I guess.”

“Ah,” says Jade. She rubs her hands on her pants, like she’s feeling the cold for you. “How. How was work?”

Sinking straight through the floor of the truck sounds like a great idea right now. Maybe you can slip out the door and onto the pavement and she won’t notice. “It was. Good. Better, I guess. Shit goes up ‘n’ down like that, everything was aight, I.” You flush dark, reach into your backpack to grab your wallet. You’re digging out your tips when Jade stops you with an elbow and a pained expression.

“You don’t have to do that, Dave,” she says, dark brows drawn tight.

“I usually give it to Rose, but,” you say, still fiddling with the badly smoothed bills.

“Dave. Really. Stop,” Jade instructs, although she sounds more imploring than authoritative. “You don’t need to prove anything to me.”

The frustration hits you, hot and intense. You hurl your wallet into the space behind the gearshift. “Well, _fuck_ , then. I guess I’ll just sit here, bein’, bein’ a complete fuckin’ _degenerate_ with nothing to show for anything. Let me get out, I’m gonna put some fucking sweatpants on—” You fuss with your backpack, ripping through its contents, already hanging halfway out the door.

Jade grabs you by the hood of your hoodie, yanking you back into your seat. “I can just turn the heat on,” she says, voice cracking like she’s about to cry. You don’t blame her. “Dave. Please stop.”

“I don’t know what you _want_ from me!” you shout desperately.

“I don’t know either!” she yells back, throwing her hands in the air. “Why do you think I do?”

“Because you’re the one who’s mad? I don’t know what you expect me to think, I’m trying to make you so you ain’t so fucking mad at me, but I don’t know how? I just…” Your ass starts to get cold for real, but you don’t get out of the truck, just in case Jade materializes a gun and puts you out of your misery execution style.

Her hands curl into fists. “How am I supposed to _not_ be mad, Dave?”

“I know!” you groan, “I just, I can’t take it back, but I want to make it _better_ , and how can I do that if you don’t tell me what you _want_?”

“I want you to go back in time and make all of this not happen,” Jade whimpers, letting her hands fall open so she can bury her face in them. It’s convenient that she does that right as your expression shifts to betrayed with maybe a little bit of heartbreak.

The idea of walking home presents itself. “You’n’me both, girl,” you say, voice quiet once more. You finally get out of the truck, backpack on your shoulder. You ignore her calling your name behind you.

“Dave wait!”

Although your initial plan was sweatpants, because it’s a long trek back to the house, you get your hand around your shades instead, prioritizing jamming them on your face over leg coverage. (They were in your backpack the whole time you were looking for them today.) You’ll survive (even if you’re not sure you even want to anymore). “Dave, _stop_.” The sidewalk under your feet starts to spasm, rocking on an invisible axis. You freeze, opting to ride it out, waiting for Jade’s control over the space you’re occupying to fizzle. The concrete slab ends up crooked. You kick at an uplifted corner. “I didn’t mean it,” Jade is saying behind you, her hands fisted in the long locks of her hair.

“Don’t rip your hair out over me, girl,” you say, hardly looking at her. The newly uprooted slab of pavement is way more interesting.

Jade shoves you. Seconds later, she folds her hands over her mouth, watching as you only barely catch your balance, clutching your still-open backpack. “I’m sorry! I didn’t— I shouldn’t—”

“Whatever. It’s not like I don’t deserve it.”

“No,” Jade says, seizing your backpack before anything can spill out. She jerks the zipper halfway closed. “I shouldn’t be acting like this. Just because you fucked up doesn’t mean you have to stand there and be abused right back.”

You don’t know how to respond to that, and so weakly say, “Jade, what about my sweatpants?” She makes a quiet, enraged sound, and the sweatpants appear in her hand. Guess she wasn’t out of juice after all. She finishes yanking the zipper shut, then pulls the entire backpack out of your grasp, replacing it with the sweatpants. “Hey—”

“Just put them on!”

“Okay,” you give in, mutely contorting your body to make the whole standing-while-dressing-in-public thing happen. Jade watches with wide green eyes, like a cornered animal trying to size up the actual merits of its captor. “Are you happy now?” you ask, trying to look as nonthreatening as possible as you tighten the drawstring around your hips.

“No,” she says bitterly, “I’m not. I’m angry and hurt and sad.”

“I get that,” you respond, hands hanging lax at your sides. “I jus’ don’t know what to do about it.”

“Apologize,” Jade says. “Do better.”

“John told me to stop apologizing like, eight times today.”

“Then don’t apologize to John,” she snaps. “But maybe the rest of us could stand to hear something.”

“I’m sorry, then.”

For a moment it looks like she’s going to throw your backpack at you, but she only digs her nails into the worn fabric and growls. “What are you sorry for?”

“Fucking up. Almost raping John. Alienating everyone. Is this what you want to hear?” She does throw your backpack, then, but not _at you_. Just at the ground. “Hey,” you interject weakly. “I got stuff in there, c’mon.”

“That doesn’t make me feel better,” she hisses, like she’s not hearing you. “You say it like that, like you’re a monster instead of just a fuck-up.”

“¿Por qué no los dos?”

Jade laughs, hysterical. “You say things in the most heartless way possible so people won’t know you’re torn up about it,” she accuses.

“I’m torn up about it,” you deadpan. “Is that what you need to hear? Do you need to hear how much it hurts? Should I write a sonnet about how I’m dying inside?”

“ _No!_ ”

“Jade, I _don’t know what to say to you_.” You push your forehead into your palms, dig your nails into your scalp. “I can’t, I can’t—” deal with everyone’s weird mixed signals, you want to say. Deal with running three individual gauntlets, not including all the weird conversations at work, not including the stares you still got from people who didn’t know you well enough to have a conversation about it…

“I just…” Her voice is pitifully small. “I just don’t understand how you could…”

“Join the club, Jade, join the fucking club! I had an aneurysm, I got eaten by a body snatcher, I’m _just a bad fucking person_. After all this time it’s finally come out, Dave Strider the sociopath, just like his brother. Walking in Bro’s footprints at long last.” She doesn’t argue, which cuts you the most. It could be she just has nothing to say. It could be she doesn’t know how to tactfully correct you without absolving you of your well deserved misery.

There’s a long stretch of silence. By the end of it you’re sitting in the shallow end of the crooked square of concrete, knees pulled up and head hidden between your elbows. Jade props her ass on a fire hydrant and stares into the empty street. When you glance over your arm, you can only see her silhouetted back. You hear something that might have been speech, but you’re not sure, so you keep your face buried. A second later, Jade lifts her voice. “... almost feel like it’s all of our faults. We all let this happen.”

“You don’t need to say shit like that, Jade. I can take it.”

“Should you have to?”

You blink up at her, frowning. “No one made these choices but me.”

“That’s not what I’m saying,” says Jade, shoulders tightening. “It's just like... we thought we could just kick a bucket full of bad stuff down a hill— I mean, we didn't kick it, but we _knew_ it was rolling and we didn't know how to stop it so we just turned away like we could pretend all that bad stuff would just magically stay inside, and then we got _mad_ when it didn't, like we actually believed ignoring it would fix the problem. If you think about it like that we'd be a bunch of dishonest assholes if we let you shoulder all the blame for this, when it's really the ugly outcome of a problem we all chose not to fix!” You swallow, wipe your close-to-leaking face on the arm of your hoodie, and don’t say anything. “In the wrong situation any of us could have dropped the ball. You went first, and _yes_ you do need to take responsibility for your shitty decisions, but no matter how angry I am, it’s not fair to act like no one else could have possibly taken it this far when put in the same position. You aren’t our punching bag, you’re our boyfriend.”

“Your boyfriend fucked up,” you spit, bitter.

“Circumstantially, no differently from any of us, just sooner—”

“Jade, no one else took drugs and violated someone’s boundaries—”

“No, but we could have!” Jade tosses her hair, spearing you with a glare over her shoulder. “Rose is an alcoholic. I’ve been possessed. John… well. Anyway, the point is, there will always be a million lurking opportunities for us to fuck up incredibly and there’s a difference between holding you accountable and making you a scapegoat.”

You look at her, raw at the edges, mouth pinched into a pained line. “I’m not sure what you want me to say here.”

Jade sags. “You don’t have to say anything, I guess. I’m just thinking.” She rakes her fingers through her long, loose hair, twisting the end into a knot. “I’m sorry, Dave,” she says at length, half her face turned toward you, but her eyes downcast.

“Don’t.”

“Dave!”

“Don’t goddamn start apologizing to _me_ ,” you say, pushing yourself up from the ground. “I don’t know why everyone is so fucking eager to sympathize with me today. Just pick something and stick with it, stop jerkin’ me around like this, I’m going to rip in two, Jade, I swear—” You don’t register when you stop talking, just that you have. Your backpack makes its way back around your shoulder and you start walking down the sidewalk toward home, face scrunched with misery.

“Where do you think you’re going?” Jade calls after you, standing forlornly on the curb.

“Home,” you call back, not turning around. “See you in a few hours.”

“You can’t walk home!” she screams. Her voice reverberates through the desolate city block. It’s gotta be past three AM by now. You aren’t quite cool enough to mutter ‘watch me’ under your breath, but it’s a nice thought.

You make it a block and a half before the truck pulls up next to you, window rolled down. “Dave, please get in the car.” You stare stubbornly at the ground and keep walking. “Dave, please. Don’t do this. You’ll catch a cold.” Good. Maybe you’ll die.  “Dave, I’m going to run you over!” Even better. Pneumonia sounds unpleasant, anyway.

The vehicle stops and you keep walking. The door opens, footsteps coming at you, and before you realize it you’re flinching, your whole body bracing for her to slam into you.

Nothing impacts. You squint warily through your shades. Jade’s just staring at you, hands hanging at her sides. “You thought I was going to hit you,” she says, voice wavering.

“You’re pretty full contact,” you say uncomfortably. Bro used to hate it when you flinched.

“Hitting you is abusive,” Jade scowls, “and no one’s yelling at me for it. You have reasons for being sensitive to that stuff—”

“I wasn’t abused,” you snap defensively. “Can we not talk about this.”

She looks unwilling to drop the subject, but does so, jamming her hands in her pockets and scuffing her toe on the pavement. “Can you please get in the car and let me drive you home? Rose is going to worry, and she’ll call to find out what’s up, and then we’ll have to explain it and you know she’ll never let it go then; we’ll be talking about it all night.”

It sounds unpleasant, but you can’t entirely rule out the possibility of it actually happening. “Fine,” you eventually concede, clenching and relaxing your jaw before you make yourself stop moving and turn toward the truck. Jade doesn’t get inside until you’re sitting down and buckled in, you guess in case you bolted or something and she had to chase you down without killing you at the end.

You spend the ride curled into the side of the car, cheek smooshed against the cool glass. Jade doesn’t say a word, and you do likewise.

She pulls into the driveway, parks the truck. Let’s it idle instead of killing the engine. “I honestly don’t know what to say anymore,” Jade says, slumped so far forward she’s almost got her forehead against the wheel. “I thought I’d make you feel better by saying that stuff.”

“I don’t need platitudes.”

“I wasn’t trying for platitudes, I was trying to be a better person.”

“You don’t owe that to me.”

“You don’t deserve to be demonized for a mistake.”

“Sexual assault is not a mistake; it’s a choice.”

Jade tenses. You think she’s caught between hyperfocusing on the subject of your grievance and trying to ignore the nuance so it’s easier to get over. Hopefully she’ll work that out once she’s gained some distance from the situation. “It’s so weird,” she murmurs at length. “When you’re being defensive, I’m so angry. I want you to feel bad and take responsibility for what you did. And then the second you do, you just look… you look so sad, and I want you to feel better, and be okay, and know it will improve once we have time to process and sit down and work on it as a family. In the end, I don’t know what I’m trying to do. I don’t know what I want. I just want us to be okay. I want John to be okay. I want Rose to be okay, and I want to be okay.” She turns her head, eyes searching. “I want _you_ to be okay, too, Dave.”

A deep, aching sigh slides from your lungs, wheezing out through your nostrils until there’s nothing left. “Nothin’ happens overnight,” you say, opening the door but not getting out. The cold air is refreshing, helping to clear your foggy head a bit. “We’ll get past this. Jus’ need some time.” You look at her, cocking a bitter grin. “And space.”

Her lips turn up, but she still looks sad. “That joke will get old some day, you know.”

“Maybe,” you say. “But not tonight.” You jump down to the driveway, grab your backpack, and disappear inside.

The house feels like an overly crowded catacomb, stuffed to the gills with restless ghosts. It feels like the awkwardest double-penetration porno, where a bunch of macho-hetero dudes try desperately not to bump dicks too much when there’s only so much room in someone’s crotch and the balls are going to slap together no matter what position they attempt. There aren’t many times you regret being in a foursome, but when everyone is on edge and trying to avoid close contact, it does make it a little weird to have a billion of y’all walking around all cagey-like.

You manage to heat up a pop tart and drink some orange juice while sustaining minimal damage. A tense smile from John but no conversation. Rose’s skirt conveniently disappearing around a corner the moment you enter a room. Jade almost bumps into you on her way down to the den; avoids your eyes but forces a smile, then texts you a stupid meme half an hour later. It’s alright.

When four o’clock rolls around, John mass texts ‘go to bed’ to the whole household, because not talking is still a thing everyone is doing, apparently. You’re not super inclined to argue, so you grab a change of clothes from the dresser and go to the upstairs bathroom because no one needs this much awkward in their tiny ensuite half bath.

The shower is quick but feels good, and you brush your teeth and shove your hair back from your eyes and stare at your bare face for too long before you shake your head, scratch at the barest hint of ‘haven’t shaved in three days, starting to actually resemble a man’ stubble, and finally put your sleep clothes on. You slouch down the stairs, frowning at your phone, only stopping when you sense an unmoving obstacle in your path. Stopping in the middle of the hallway, just before the entrance to the bedroom, you discover that obstacle to be Rose, who looks very much like she’s… guarding something.

Oh.

She stands there in her nightgown, sizing you up. “Everything okay?” you ask, unsure and for some reason intensely worried.

“Yes,” Rose says, voice crisp. “I just wanted to talk to you for a moment.”

You glance around, letting your eyes scope out the expanse of your surroundings. “Innnn… the hallway?”

“Yes,” she repeats, narrowing her eyes. “Do you have a problem with that?”

“No, I’m jus’ curious. Kind of a weird place to hold a conversation, is all.”

“I like liminal spaces,” replies Rose, staring boredly as you fidget.  

“Gotcha.”

You feel like she’s letting you squirm, this soft girl in a pink nightdress, waiting for you to entirely abandon composure because it’s easier to cut down a target whose senses are dulled from panic. “After having observed today’s proceedings, I’ve compiled a few notes that I am inclined to share with you,” she begins. If she were joking around, she’d be steepling her fingers comically, but her hands do not move from her sides. “I appreciate the efforts that have been thus far made to mend the split seam that has inflicted itself, as it were, upon our household. Your willingness to accept criticism and consequence has been beneficial to the healing process.”

You feel out what’s coming next. “But?” you prompt.

“But nothing,” Rose continues smoothly, even factoring in a cool, professional smile that doesn’t reach her eyes. A shiver tickles the back of your neck as the hairs raise forebodingly. “I genuinely would like to offer credit where it’s due: you have been incredibly cooperative about this whole affair, and upon witnessing this, I feel wholly comfortable knowing how much you’d _love_ to accommodate any further requests presented to your person.”

The bad feeling you got when you first saw her compounds into a thousand different bad feelings that pile into a lump in your stomach. Your throat is suddenly very dry, and as such it’s hard to retort, even though Rose is so kindly giving you a space in which to speak. “Shoot,” you rasp, because anything else would be a distraction from the inevitable, and she’s already drawing it out far enough as it is.

Her eyebrows arch. You think she’s going to deny that she wants something from you, make you beg to hear it, but then Rose opens her mouth and her voice is chilling: “I believe it would be in all of our best interests if you didn’t sleep with us.”

It hits you like a blow, but you refuse to buckle. “I get it,” you say, forced casual. “John probably needs some space for the night—”

“No,” Rose cuts in.

“No?”

She’s shorter than you, but she draws herself up, and standing in the dark hallway illuminated only by the light from the bedroom lamp, Rose looks massive. “Make no mistake: I am not approaching you on John’s behalf. Nor am I intending for this to be a blip on the peripheral radar.”

Your mouth makes a shape like a wound, brow crumpled in an overly trusting display of emotion. You lick your dry lips. “I’m not following you, exactly.”

“Then let me be more plain,” she says. “You are not welcome in this bed or this room. Indefinitely.”

“I don’t get it,” you say again. “Did John ask you to—”

“This is _not about John_ ,” Rose hisses, and finally… finally you see her hands start to shake, only a split second before she curls her fingers into small, graceful fists. Rose has hands like a lady in a Renaissance painting. “I need to get it on record, right now, for all of our sakes, that we need space from you. I need space. From you.” You place a hand over your heart, because the weirdest pang just erupted in your chest, and it’s not going away. Rose stares at you like Gentileschi’s Judith, so warm in the yellow lamp light. The shadows are stark on her face. “It’s clearer to me than it was, not thirty seconds ago, that not once have you considered my feelings during this debacle. You exist inside a delusion that I will now do my best to dispel, one where you’ve come to see my place as one who assists, but never is assisted. One who heals, but never hurts.

“I am telling you that, for the good of our continued relationship, a profound distance needs to be established between us. Otherwise…” The hard angle of her shoulders goes weak around the edges, fuzzy in the low light. She falters, dropping her gaze. “Otherwise, I don’t know.” You are quiet for a good long time, unmoving. Her shadow stretches the length of the hall; a looming beast, ready to consume. “Needless to say,” Rose adds, turning away from you, “this is non-negotiable. Please do me the favour of not apologizing before you walk away.”

You nearly run into Jade a second time tonight as you hurry your way down the stairs into the den.


	4. ending notes

Hey y’all. I hope I didn’t get anyone’s hopes up, but this is unfortunately not the last chapter of ‘filter through.’ This is what would have happened if there had been a final chapter.

For reasons that won’t be elaborated on, I will not be writing any more of this story. I apologize for the letdown. Because I don’t want to leave anyone hanging, I decided to post an outline of the final chapter’s notes so readers can at least know how it was going to end.

 

  * “and life does go on”
    * insert a tough but feel-good fast forward through the next several months. yes, months, and yes, several. this isn’t a wound that was healed overnight, but eventually the kids start warming up to each other again and figuring out how their relationship is going to look once everyone has finished processing.  
  

  * Rose decides she wants to visit Dave at work. He reluctantly acquiesces, not realizing she’s going to bring John and Jade too. That’s not the only surprise of the night. Halfway through his set Rose literally makes it rain dollar bills and Dave nearly kills himself trying not to laugh. Afterward, they all hang out with Dave's work crew.  
  
This was gonna be a pretty big scene. The reincarnation plot ended up way bigger than expected, so to be true to that, everyone in the beta house is going to realize that Dave’s club friends are reincarnated trolls. The basic points that were going to be touched on are:
    * Rose sees Kanti and gets hugely emotional. (Of course she recognizes her immediately.)
    * John figures out Nova halfway through dinner. Dave has to talk the three of them down and ask them not to make a big deal out of it because no one except Yaz remembers a damn thing and causing a ruckus will help nobody.
    * Everyone calms down. Despite the reincarnation drama they all have fun.
    * At some point, Jade mentions her job situation. Yaz says she knows a girl and will see if she can hook Jade up.
    * Surprise! When they go home, Dave gets to come back to bed  
  

  * Yaz walks in on Dave in the fursuit while cleaning. Someone “accidentally” left the front door open and she saw him through the screen.
    * I totally forgot I commissioned artwork for this scene.
    * Yaz tells Dave that she can get Jade a job at this lab her friend works at.



  * Excited about the good news, Dave goes to tell Jade about Yaz’s message. He indecorously walks in on Jade and Rose pegging.
    * It’s really awkward for a second. He tries to leave, but they ask what he wanted to tell them. He obliges.
    * After a moment of consideration, the girls invite him to join them. Jade pegs Dave while he eats Rose out. They got the fursuit pants off but not the top, and he’s still wearing it during sex. John walks in, sees it, and hemorrhages laughter.
    * Things are starting to feel better, right?  
  

  * Dave and Jade go to meet Yaz's friend. Remember I said the reincarnation plot took off? First person they meet is the Doctor’s assistant. Her name is Solaris and she’s really, really obviously Sollux’s reincarnation. Sounds promising.
    * While they’re trying to be subtle about prying into Solaris’ life, the Doctor walks out, sees them, and screams.
    * Surprise, it’s Roxy. She drops her clipboard and barrels over to them, tackling them into a massive hug which fails to shock Solaris even kind of. She’s doesn’t question anything Roxy does.


  * I’m sure I’d have followed up with a cheerful group ending that made some lesson out of all of this. Rest assured, things will be okay. A lot of mistakes were made, but the family is not broken, and they’re starting to realize that uncurling from their antisocial polycule has resulted in them finding people they thought they’d never see again. No other characters from the Game were introduced in the story, but hopefully they’d go on to find more of them in their own time.



 

Thanks everyone who came back to read the ending notes. Sorry to say I couldn’t finish it properly.


End file.
